Wait, So How Much Does The Milky Way Weigh?
Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - 00:20
in Astronomy & Space
Does this galaxy make me look fat? Has Andromeda been taking skinny selfies? It turns out the way some astrophysicists have been studying our galaxy made it appear that the Milky Way might be more massive than it's neighbor Andromeda. It isn't, says a study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by an international group of researchers, including Matthew Walker of Carnegie Mellon University's McWilliams Center for Cosmology. In the paper, they outline a new, more accurate method for measuring the mass of galaxies. Using this method, the researchers have shown that the Milky Way has only about half the mass of its neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. read more