The Milky Way. Credit: NASA
It is a galactic challenge, to be sure, but Gwendolyn Eadie is getting closer to an accurate answer to a question that has defined her early career in astrophysics: what is the mass of the Milky Way? The short answer, so far, is 7 X 1011 solar masses. In terms that are easier to comprehend, that’s about the mass of our Sun, multiplied by 700 billion. The Sun, for the record, has a mass of 2 nonillion (that’s 2 followed by 30 zeroes) kilograms, or 330,000 times the mass of Earth.
“And our galaxy isn’t even the biggest galaxy,” Eadie says.
Measuring the mass of our home galaxy, or any galaxy, is particularly difficult. A galaxy includes not only stars, planets, moons, gases, dust and other objects and material, but also a big helping of dark matter.
Eadie, a PhD c...
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