Milky Way is lighter in weight, claiming that a team of scientists
- A team of Chinese and foreign scientists accurately measured the mass of the Milky Way and found that it was about 550 billion times that of the mass of the sun.
- This result was recently published in the journal Royal Astronomical Society Monthly.
- The newly measured mass of the Milky Way is almost half the average measured by other research teams, about half and half the mass of the sun 1 trillion times.
According to China Xinhua News Agency , a research team composed of Chinese and foreign scientists accurately measured the mass of the Milky Way and found that its mass is about 550 billion times the mass of the sun.
This result was recently published in the journal Royal Astronomical Society Monthly.
The newly measured mass of the Milky Way is almost half the average measured by other research teams, about 1 trillion times the mass of the sun.
" According to our latest results, the Milky Way may be 'thinner' than previously thought ," said Xue Xiangxiang, the National Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who participated in the study.
" This means that the non-luminous but gravitational dark matter is much less than initially estimated ," the researchers said.
Xue believes that mass is crucial to understanding galaxy dynamics. However, due to observational limitations, there is great uncertainty in its estimates.
In this study, scientists obtained results based on data obtained from the reference optical telescope LAMOST and from the European Space Agency (ESA).
Xue said that compared with the research conducted by other teams of scientists, the large number of spectral data samples provided by LAMOST is one of the main advantages of this study.
" samples not only have large numbers and coverage, but also record the three-dimensional (3D) position, 3D velocity and metal abundance of each star ," she added.
The team conducting this research is composed of scientists from the Three Gorges University of China (CTGU), China National Offshore Oil Corporation, Swinburne University of Science and Technology, Australia and Shanghai Jiaotong University , etc.
Luohua News Agency
