An international team of scientists working together to measure the Milky Way’s mass found that it is about 550 billion times the mass of the Sun.

The results were just released in the Royal Astronomical Society’s journal, Monthly Notices.

The newly determined mass of the Milky Way is about half the average number measured by other research teams, which is approximately 1 trillion times the Sun’s mass.

Researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory (NAOC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Xue Xiangxiang, indicated that their most recent findings “suggest that the Milky Way may be ‘slimmer’ than we previously thought”.

“This means,” according to the author, “that there is much less non-luminous but gravitational dark matter in the Galaxy than originally estimated.”

Xue says that the mass is a key part of understanding how the Galaxy works. Due to the constraints of the available observations, there has been a significant amount of uncertainty in this estimation.

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 advantages of this study from previous research by other research teams, according to Xue, is the huge sample of spectroscopic data offered by LAMOST.

“Not only large in number and coverage, the sample also records the three-dimensional (3D) position, 3D velocity, and metal abundance of each star,” she said.

Researchers from China Three Gorges University, NAOC, Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, etc. comprised the research team.

Image Credit: Getty

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