Does this globular cluster make my butt wait braggy ? It ’s a problem any weight unit - conscious extragalactic nebula would be concerned about . But how does a galaxy get it on if it ’s pile on the pounds ? You ca n’t find out a Galax urceolata ’s weight by require it to step on some galactic scales . It ’s even harder to find out when you ’re inside the Galax urceolata you ’re trying to consider : the Milky Way . ( Do you Milky Weigh it ? ) Fortunately , scientists fromColumbia Universitythink they have a solution .
Measurementshave been madein the past on the weight of the Milky Way , so a weighting prediction for the galaxy is n’t novel . The techniquepublishedinThe Astrophysical Journalis though , and it ’s refreshingly originative .
Objects with more multitude have a stronger gravitational force — the gravity on Earth is stronger than that of the moonlight , for example . It follows , then , that the quite a little of the Milky Way is able to affect the orbits of artificial satellite lead outside of its magnetic disk . These stars have some special properties that cause them to emit stellar streams in their wake . They come from decay spherical clusters .
" spheric clusters are compact groups of thousands to several millions of stars that were born together when the universe was still very young,“saidAndreas Küpper . " They revolve around the Milky path and tardily decay over the path of gazillion of year , entrust a unique trace behind . Such star stream adhere out from the rest of the star in the sky as they are dense and coherent , much like contrails from airplanes well adhere out from even cloud . "
The squad looked at the stellar stream of a star call Palomar 5 . The flow contained wiggles in it that appear periodically .
Palomar 5 flow viaColumbia University
" We found the wiggles to be very pronounced and regularly spaced along the stream,“saidEduardo Balbinot . " Such variation can not be random . "
Using this rhythmic data , the team created a computer model of the Milky Way and Palomar 5 and adjust dissimilar variable to see what happen . They found that the path of the star was the most standardised to real life-time when the mass of the Milky Way was 210 billion time the mass of the sunlight . It also had to be contained within a radius of 60,000 light - years .
The next level for the researchers is to continue this research and map the Milky Way in more detail . This will hopefully grant scientists to make improved foretelling about the Milky Way ’s organization .
[ ViaThe Astrophysical Journal , The University of British Columbia , Science Daily ]
