A team put together by scientists from China and Australia has managed to accurately measure the mass of the Milky Way. They found that the galaxy weighs about 550 billion times as much as the Sun, which is just over half the estimates raised earlier.
The results that refute the average value obtained by other research, of about 1 trillion times the mass of the Sun, were described in an article published this month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,
"Our results suggest that the Milky Way may be 'thinner' than we previously thought," Xue Xiangxiang, lead author of the study and a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), told the Xinhua news agency. "This means that there is much less non-luminous but gravitational dark matter in the galaxy than originally estimated."
According to the scientist, mass is crucial to understanding the dynamics and functioning of the galaxy. However, there was a high degree of uncertainty in the estimates due to limited observations.
In this new approach, the researchers relied on data from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Optic Telescope (LAMOST), a state-of-the-art optical observatory in China, and the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite ( ESA).
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According to Xue, the large sample of spectroscopic data provided by LAMOST is one of the main advantages of this research compared to studies by other scientific teams.
"Not only are they large in number and coverage, but the data also records the three-dimensional position, 3D velocity and metallic abundance of each star," added Xue, leader of the team put together by scientists from NAOC, Chinese Three Gorges University and University of China. Swinburne Technology in Australia, among other institutions.
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