Astronomers Take Galaxys Pulse - Assignment Example

Big galaxies are the universe’s metropolises. Recently astronomers have spotted a big elliptical galaxy that shimmers as its stars pulsate. Big galaxies are alight with the home fires of billions of stellar residents. Observing the universe is the same as looking down on a global city from space. Through this, we can see the stellar suburbs and downtowns and also the layout of a number of neighborhoods. However, we usually do not notice the impact of each family switching their lights on and off.

Despite this, astronomers have managed to do the opposite. They have measured the shimmering of an individual galaxy. The stars are referred to as Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars for a position in which they are placed in the Hertz sprung-Russell stellar evolution diagram. The stars are old and worn-out. They have exhausted their hydrogen cores into helium and after that into carbon. The end product is some fusion in a number of shells around the inert carbon-ash core. Because the fusion is unstable, the stars brighten and fade over several hundred days (Carlisle).

  To detect the shimmer, Harvard University’s Charlie Conroy and his colleagues took a careful observation of the giant elliptical galaxy M87. The megalopolis is approximately a hundred times the mass of Milky Way and full of old stars.