Mass: 1.5 trillion solar masses
The mass of the Milky Way is one of the most fundamental knowledge that astronomers can get about our galactic home. However, by the beginning of 2019, despite decades of intensive efforts, even the best available estimates of the mass of the Milky Way diverge greatly. In February 2019, combining new data from the ESA Gaia mission with observations using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers discovered that our Galaxy "weighs" about 1.5 trillion solar masses within a radius of 129,000 light-years from the center.
Previous estimates of the mass of the Milky Way ranged from 500 billion to 3 trillion masses of the Sun. This huge uncertainty arose mainly due to various methods for measuring the distribution of dark matter, which makes up about 90% of the mass of the Galaxy.
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