Hubble & Gaia Accurately Weigh the Milky Way
Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2019 6:02 pm
Hubble & Gaia Accurately Weigh the Milky Way
ESA Hubble Science Release | 2019 Mar 07
What Does the Milky Way Weigh? Hubble and Gaia Investigate
NASA | GSFC | STScI | HubbleSite | 2019 Mar 07
Evidence for an Intermediate-Mass Milky Way from Gaia DR2 Halo Globular Cluster Motions ~ Laura L. Watkins et al
ESA Hubble Science Release | 2019 Mar 07
In a striking example of multi-mission astronomy, measurements from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the ESA Gaia mission have been combined to improve the estimate of the mass of our home galaxy the Milky Way: 1.5 trillion solar masses.Globular Clusters Surrounding the Milky Way (Artist’s Impression)Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, L. Calçada, M. Kormesser
The mass of the Milky Way is one of the most fundamental measurements astronomers can make about our galactic home. However, despite decades of intense effort, even the best available estimates of the Milky Way’s mass disagree wildly. Now, by combining new data from the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia mission with observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have found that the Milky Way weighs in at about 1.5 trillion solar masses within a radius of 129 000 light-years from the galactic centre.
Previous estimates of the mass of the Milky Way ranged from 500 billion to 3 trillion times the mass of the Sun. This huge uncertainty arose primarily from the different methods used for measuring the distribution of dark matter — which makes up about 90% of the mass of the galaxy. ...
What Does the Milky Way Weigh? Hubble and Gaia Investigate
NASA | GSFC | STScI | HubbleSite | 2019 Mar 07
Evidence for an Intermediate-Mass Milky Way from Gaia DR2 Halo Globular Cluster Motions ~ Laura L. Watkins et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1804.11348 > 30 Apr 2018 (v1), 08 Feb 2019 (v3)