Lecture 24: The Realm of the Nebulae

How did we come to understand that the Milky Way was just one of billions of other galaxies in a vast Universe? This lecture reviews the history of how we came to recognize that the spiral nebulae were, in fact, other milky ways like our own: vast systems of 100s of billions of stars located millions of parsecs away. The key to understanding their nature was finding the distances to the spiral nebulae compared to the size of our Galaxy. Recorded 2006 February 8 in 1008 Evans Laboratory on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State University.