The correct option about Milky Way.

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Chapter 16, Problem 2TY

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The correct option about Milky Way.

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An important part of the lifecycle of galaxies like the Milky Way is the self regulation of formation of future generations of stars. Which statement best describes this process? A) Massive stars explode as Supernovae, heating nearby gas which then can't form stars, and even forcing the gas out of the galaxy in asuperbubble. B) Low mass stars like our Sun explode as Supernovae, heating nearby gas which then can't form stars, and even forcing the gas out the galaxy in asuperbubble. C) Stars fuse new elements in their cores which mix with nearby gas clouds, preventing the collapse of the clouds and hence stopping new starformation. D) The stars lock up material in their cores (like White Dwarf and Neutron Stars) meaning they can act as gravitational seeds for future starformation.

The Milky Way galaxy has about 5 x 10⁹ solar masses of gas in total. If 13 solar masses of that gas is turned into stars each year, how many more years could the Milky Way keep up with such a star formation rate? years (Note for comparison that the age of the universe is about 13.5 billion years, which can be written 1.35e10 years. Also, the value given is in the ballpark of how much gas in the Milky Way is used to make new stars each year.)

Consider the Milky Way disk, which has a 50 kpc diameter and a total height of 600 pc. Suppose that the Sun orbits precisely at the mid-plane of the disk in a circular orbit. Supernovae explosions happen randomly throughout the disk at a rate of about 2 per 100 years. Consider a spherical region around the Sun with a radius of 300 pc. Ignore the Milky Way bulge and halo in this problem; assume the Milky Way disk is perfectly uniform and extends all the way through the region of the bulge. (I.e., the Milky Way is modeled *only* as a cylindrical disk--like a hockey puck-- with constant density throughout.) If a particular supernova goes off at a random location within the disk, what is the probability that it went off in the 300 pc radius spherical region near the Sun? Express your probability as a percentage (but without writing the percent sign). [Hint: there is a 100% probability that the supernova went off somewhere in the volume of the Milky Way disk; there is a 50% probability that…