Abstract
ONE of the most interesting and most mysterious features of the stellar contents of our own and other known galaxies is the fact that there seem to exist two rather distinct types of stellar populations differing between themselves by mechanical as well as by physical properties of individual members. In fact, as was first indicated by Oort1, the so-called ‘high-velocity' stars which describe highly elongated elliptic trajectories around the galactic centre seem to possess rather different physical characteristics as compared with the ‘ordinary' stars predominating in the neighbourhood of our sun and moving along regular, almost circular, orbits. This distinction was amplified by the recent work of Baade2, who has shown that the ordinary type of stellar population (which he calls type I) is characteristic only for the region of spiral arms, whereas the other type (type II) forms the structure of the galactic nucleus along with the tenuous, almost spherical, ‘atmosphere' surrounding the entire system. All elliptical and spherical galaxies seem to be formed entirely from stars of type II.
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References
Oort, T. H., Groningen Pub., No. 40 (1926).
Baade, W., Astrophys. J., 100, 137 (1944).
Morgan, W. W., and Keenan, P. C., "An Atlas of Stellar Spectra" (Astrophysical Monographs) (Chicago, 1943).
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GAMOW, G. Mixed Types of Stellar Populations. Nature 162, 816 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/162816a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/162816a0
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