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THE CENTER OF THE GALAXY LAB

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THE CENTER OF THE GALAXY OBJECTIVE You will study the historical progress of our understanding of the size of the universe and will repeat the work of Harlow Shapley to determine where the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is located. EQUIPMENT Ruler, protractor, pencil, polar graph paper (provided as last page of this document) INTRODUCTION For centuries it was believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe. This belief, known as the geocentric model, held that the Earth was stationary while the sky revolved above it on a set of celestial spheres. Aristotle eloquently argued how the Earth must be stationary and thus the center of the Universe because 1) you could not feel the Earth move, 2) there was no wind due to a moving Earth, hence it must be stationary, 3) the birds and the clouds would be left behind if the Earth was moving, and 4) if the Earth was moving the stars would display a parallax effect. This was to be the common belief for over 1800 years. Not only because of the persuasive arguments of Aristotle, but also because a feature of the Greek Philosophy was that the Universe was perfect. So, they believed that the celestial spheres the stars moved on were perfect, and everything in the sky was perfect. Later, as the Catholic Church rose to prominence, this would be interpreted as a philosophy of a perfect sky as an indication of a perfect God. Therefore, any philosophy that did not agree with the geocentric belief was considered heretical. Anyone professing such beliefs risked facing the wrath of the Church. This understandably made people reluctant to present new ideas. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published Concerning the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres. He was very elderly, and in fact received the first copy of his book the day he died. This undoubtedly played a role in his decision to publish because his book presented what we call the heliocentric model. What Copernicus claimed was that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Universe and the Earth, stars and planets all revolved about the Sun. It is this book that marks the beginning of modern astronomy and modern science. Because of the enormous importance of the work, the heliocentric model is commonly called the Copernican System. Copernicus’ work was initially rejected and his book was banned by the Church. But the damage had been done and Johannes Kepler devoted himself to the task of mathematically describing the orbits of the planets about the Sun. He was able to solve this problem by 1619 with Kepler’s Three Laws of Planetary Motion. Galileo declared in the early 1600’s that he believed in the Copernican System, but he didn’t have the necessary tools to prove it

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