An international team of scientists has tried to calculate an estimated mass of the Milky Way galaxy using sophisticated models. They have written their efforts and results on paper, and have posted it on the arXiv preprint server.
Research before has led to estimates of the size of our galaxy, which is now thought to be 256,000 light-years across.
Now, in this new effort, the researchers have carried out work that has led to an estimate of our galaxy's mass—approximately 890 billion times that of the sun, or 3.9 tredecillion pounds.
Figuring out the size, shape and mass of our galaxy is no easy feat considering that we are measuring it from within. We cannot see much of it because of interstellar gases and occluding stars. Because of that, scientists have looked for other ways to map the galaxy.
Find out more about the model that they used over at PHYS.org.
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
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Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
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What's wild about this to me is that our solar system "wanders" from one arm of the galaxy to the next. The arms themselves are a temporal illusion based on wave dynamics, so it's not so much that we're actually moving that far, but the density pattern shifts as the arms rotate. Of course, this is all happening on a celestial timescale so even knowing the details it's all a bit hard to visualize.
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