Milky Way seems smaller than originally believed, based on a study

Chinese media said that a research team made up of Chinese and foreign experts had precisely calculated the Milky Way's mass, finding that it was approximately 550 billion times the mass of the Sun.

The average mass of the Milky Way, as determined by other research teams, was approximately 1 trillion times the mass of the Sun. The newly determined mass of the Milky Way is almost half of that estimate.

In the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the findings were just recently published.

A key member of the research team and a researcher from the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xue Xiangxiang, stated that the most recent findings "indicate that the Milky Way may be slimmer than we previously assumed" (NAOC).

This indicates that the amount of gravitationally-active non-luminous dark matter in the galaxy is significantly lower than previously thought, she continued.

To comprehend the dynamics of the galaxy, according to Xue, the mass is essential.

According to China Global Television, there has been a lot of ambiguity in this calculation because of the limitations of the available observations.

The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), a top optical telescope in China, and the Gaia spacecraft of the European Space Agency were used by the researchers to generate the findings for this study.

One of the key advantages of this study above previous research by other research teams, according to Xue, is the enormous sample of spectroscopic data offered by LAMOST.

The sample "recorded the three-dimensional (3D) position, 3D velocity, and metal abundance of each star, in addition to being enormous in number and coverage," the author continued.

Researchers from NAOC, the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, China Three Gorges University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and other institutions made up the research team.

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