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A research team made up of Chinese and foreign scientists has accurately measured the mass of the Milky Way revealing it to be about 550 billion times the mass of the Sun.
The results were published recently in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The newly measured mass of the Milky Way is nearly half the average value measured by other research teams, which was about 1 trillion times the mass of the Sun.
“Our latest results suggest that the Milky Way may be ‘slimmer’ than we previously thought,” said Xue Xiangxiang, a main member of the research team and a researcher from the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).
