The Milky Way’s mass has been precisely determined to be around 550 billion times that of the Sun by a research team made up of Chinese and foreign scientists, according to Chinese media.
The Milky Way’s mass has recently been measured, and the new value is about half that of earlier study teams’ average measurements, which was roughly 1 trillion times the mass of the Sun.
The results were just released in the Royal Astronomical Society’s journal, Monthly Notices.
According to Xue Xiangxiang, a principal member of the research team and a researcher from the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese academy of Sciences, “our most recent results show that the Milky Way may be’slimmer’ than we previously imagined” (NAOC).
This indicates that the galaxy contains significantly less non-luminous but gravitationally active dark matter than was previously thought, she continued.
The mass is essential to comprehending the dynamics of the galaxy, according to Xue.
Due to the limitations of the observations, there has been a significant amount of uncertainty in the estimation, according to China Global Television.
In this study, the researchers used data from the Gaia satellite and China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), two of the best optical telescopes in the country.
One of the key benefits of this research in comparison to previous research by other research teams, according to Xue, is the vast sample of spectroscopic data provided by LAMOST.
The sample, she continued, “recorded the three-dimensional (3D) position, 3D velocity, and metal abundance of each star in addition to being huge in number and coverage.
Scientists from China Three Gorges University, NAOC, Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and other institutions made up the research team.
