Galactic Structure and the Dwingeloo Telescope

Abstract

Galactic structure and the Dwingeloo Telescope In his lifetime Oort received many honors, among which the Vetlesen Prize of Columbia University and the Dutch Golden Quill. His efforts to obtain light distributions of galaxies from photographic plates he had taken at Mount Wilson finally produced results. During the 1960s Dwingeloo observations gave important new insight in the spiral structure of the Galaxy, indicating that it was maintained by a density wave, showed evidence for activity in the nucleus of the Galaxy, and led to the discovery’s of high-velocity clouds. Oort proposed that these showed an inflow of matter into the Galaxy from intergalactic space and provided insights into the problem of galaxy formation.

... an autocratic gentleman of about seventy,

with a balding skull and a sharply etched face.

[...] That was the director, he said [...],

– who had not only shown that the Milky Way system was

rotating, but also that it had spiral structure.

Harry Mulisch (1927–2010)  

With their radio telescopes they can capture

wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the

total amount of energy collected from outside

the solar system from all of them together

since collecting began (in 1951) is less than the

energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.

Carl Edward Sagan (1934–1996)

Harry Kurt Victor Mulisch was a prominent Dutch writer. The quote (my translation) is from his novel The Discovery of Heaven [341]. One of the main characters, Max Delius, is—just as I was— a Ph.D. student in Leiden around 1970, studying the Galactic center in Dwingeloo and preparing to use the Westerbork Telescope.

The numerical justification is questionable, see [342]. The comparison is sometimes incorrectly attributed to William McGuire (Bill) Bryson (b. 1951) , who actually does quote it with proper reference in A short history of nearly everything [343].