NASA and ESA Calculate the Mass of Milky Way Galaxy

NASA and European Space Agency used the data collected by Hubble Space Telescope and Gaia Telescope to calculate the mass of Milky Way Galaxy accurately. The space agencies announced the results of the calculations done using the data from both of the powerful telescopes. The scientists have overcome the difficulty of identifying and weighing the Dark matter and accurately calculated the mass of our galaxy after facing numerous problems in the past. After analyzing the data from Gaia of ESA and Hubble of NASA, scientists applied the formulas and found the exact mass of our galaxy and radius of the same.

The scientists downloaded the data from Gaia mission and Hubble Space Telescope and concluded that the Milky Way galaxy that hosts our solar system weighs around 1.5 trillion solar masses and has the radius of 129,000 light years from the center. The solar masses is the unit that is used to find the weight of a cosmic object. One solar mass is equal to the mass of our sun, and the milky way galaxy weighs around 1.5 trillion solar masses, which is enormous. As 90% of the universe is filled with the dark matter, the calculation is done before this attempt varied.

Previously, the calculations predicted the mass of our galaxy from 500 billion to 3 trillion solar masses. But as scientists figured out the weight of the dark matter, the results that these space agencies shared are found to be accurate. To calculate the mass of dark matter, Laura Watkins, of the European Southern Observatory in Germany calculated the velocities of globular clusters while they were orbiting the outer disk of the galaxy. These globular clusters are almost 65,000 light years away from earth. After analyzing 34 globular clusters and 12 distant stars with ESA’s Gaia Space Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, scientists found the mass of Milky Way Galaxy to be precise.