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It has just been revealed that the Milky Way, the galaxy in which our solar system is an infinitesimal point, weighs much heavier than we originally thought and much less than did it. predicted some scientists.
Scientists used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Gaia satellite, launched in December 2013, to accurately measure the positions and movements of hundreds of millions of galactic objects.
The researchers then created the most detailed 3D map of the Milky Way ever seen and were finally able to determine the weight of the Milky Way at about 1.5 trillion times the weight of our Sun, called "solar mass" . A solar mass is about 1,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg – about a billion. Previous estimates had varied between 500 billion and 3,000 billion times the solar mass, making it a significant refinement of accuracy.
WHO WOULD LIKE TO KNOW SUCH THING?
Astronomers and physicists have been looking at this issue for decades, but a team led by Laura Watkins of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, and starring N. Wyn Evans of the University from Cambridge, seems to have found the answer that will have all the space studies and probably space travel – if we ever go beyond our own backyard of the Milky Way.
This being the space, there is of course an immediate mystery. Much of the weight of the galaxy is dark matter that is completely invisible.
The suns and the planets are measurable, but according to the report of the team on the gross weight of the galaxy: "only a tiny percentage of this is attributed to the 200 billion stars of the Milky Way and includes a super black hole massive in the center. Most of the rest of the mass is enclosed in dark matter, an invisible and mysterious substance that acts as a scaffold throughout the universe and keeps the stars in their galaxies. "
IF YOU CAN NOT SEE IT MUCH, HOW CAN YOU MEASURE IT?
Let the team explain: "Most of the mass of the Milky Way is" invisible ", we can not measure it directly, but we can deduce its presence by its influence on its environment. In general, this is a dynamic study.
Any mass distribution gives rise to a gravitational potential that causes the displacement of objects: by studying the measurements of the movements of objects, we can work backward to recover the underlying gravitational potential and hence the mass distribution. "
So, what is the milky way?
Our natal galaxy is a constant in the night sky and has been described as "milky" by the Greeks and Romans. It is a spiral galaxy in a cluster of galaxies. We are stuck in one of his arms, about 26 billion light years from the center.
Do not be confused with ….
The Milky Way chocolate bar, once advertised as "so light it will not ruin your appetite". Unlike the real Milky Way, it seems.
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