March 7th ESA Article States Hubble & Gaia "Accurately" Weighs The Milky Way Galaxy, Really??

Yeah, I take issue with the word "accurately" that is being used to describe this discovery. Scientists have said in the past, that they don't exactly know what gravity is; they only know how it behaves in the universe. In addition, they haven't a clue on what dark matter is made of, nor do they know what the nature of dark energy actually is. So, how could they have come up with an ACCURATE weight, when there are so many variables that involves dark matter, dark energy and the mass of every heavenly body that makes up The Milky Way? By just using the data that came from two telescopes?

Scientists have stated that "thousands" of black holes may exist within the Milky Way.

So based on the new finds, the study authors think that as many as 500 black hole binaries exist in the Milky Way, and that the galaxy hosts up to ten thousand black holes in total.

news.nationalgeographic.com...

Scientists are still learning about gravitational waves and how they affect other celestial bodies. Wouldn't the presence of black holes affect the weight of The Milky Way galaxy? How did scientists devise an algorithm accurate enough to factor in all these variables, in order for them to determine an "accurate" weight of the entire Milky Way? I might be wrong, but I think this is an exaggerated claim. I know there are many ATS members who have more knowledge than me in this field, so what's your opinion?

Hubble & Gaia accurately weigh the Milky Way

However, despite decades of intense effort, even the best available estimates of the Milky Way's mass disagree wildly. Now, by combining new data from the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia mission with observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have found that the Milky Way weighs in at about 1.5 trillion solar masses within a radius of 129 000 light-years from the galactic centre.

Previous estimates of the mass of the Milky way ranged from 500 billion to 3 trillion times the mass of the Sun. This huge uncertainty arose primarily from the different methods used for measuring the distribution of dark matter – which makes up about 90% of the mass of the galaxy.

"By combining Gaia's measurements of 34 globular clusters with measurements of 12 more distant clusters from Hubble, we could pin down the Milky Way's mass in a way that would be impossible without these two space telescopes."

sci.esa.int...

Makes me think they are bored.
or just trying to keep their funding.

Actually, the article says this:

In a striking example of multi-mission astronomy, measurements from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the ESA Gaia mission have been combined to improve the estimate of the mass of our home galaxy the Milky Way: 1.5 trillion solar masses.

The paper itself says this:

We estimate the mass of the Milky Way (MW) within 21.1 kpc using the kinematics of halo globular clusters (GCs) determined by Gaia.

imgsrc.hubblesite.org...

a reply to: shawmanfromny

These people dbl as the "guess your weight" hawkers at carnivals and circuses right? The use of the word accurate in this case tells a lot more about the new "consensus" driven idiot "science" than it does about any measurement.

Cheers - Dave

a reply to: Phage

Are you disputing the fact that the article I linked, included this statement, "Hubble & Gaia accurately weigh the Milky Way?" You can try to spin it all you want, however, there's no denying that they used the word accurately.

a reply to: shawmanfromny

Yes.
Headlines are cool. But not always accurate as to the content.

How did scientists devise an algorithm accurate enough to factor in all these variables, in order for them to determine an "accurate" weight of the entire Milky Way?

I provided a link to the paper. Have at it.

Dude, if you want to see some serious astronomical hilarity, go check the wikipedia article for rogue planets.

Our estimates from real scientists and published research on rogue planets put the figures in this range...

1 for every 4 stars or...
100,000 per star...

Wtf science, doesn't that seem a little broad?

a reply to: Archivalist

Our estimates from real scientists and published research on rogue planets put the figures in this range...

The Milky Way alone may have billions of rogue planets.

en.wikipedia.org...

I see no "range."

a reply to: shawmanfromny

The black hole's also throw up another interesting problem for there claim of accuracy.
Black hole's and brown hole's do both exist or is there only brown holes (hawking), black holes would provide an explanation for the big bang itself as well as suggest the universe with shared laws of physic's but perhaps also with time at differential rates may exist in a potentially infinite number of time space continuum's one within another with the black hole's as there cause and also there doom - also true black hole's provide a definite alternative to the so called dark energy and dark matter and definitely provide a clear explanation for the seeming acceleration of matter as the universe may be accelerating in it's expansion - except it's expansion would then be indicative of our time space continuum actually existing within the null point at the very center of a black hole that has formed in another pre-existing time space continuum, between us and that continuum would be an event horizon (internal event horizon), the black hole proper and then another event horizon (it's external event horizon), our continuum exists within it's own space but think about it like this, our time space continuum is not necessarily smaller than the out outside of it but time here - our constant of time - would flow at a rate much faster than that of the external continuum.
The accelerating expansion of our universe would then be down to the force of the external black hole pulling our universe toward the inner event horizon.
As our universe is destroyed upon meeting that event horizon and as our space time itself then suffers entropic decay the so called quantum evaporation of that parent black hole back into it's parent continuum would occur at such a rate that the re-merging of the tiny trapped point within it were our continuum now exists would not be an explosion but a rather boring event of nothing happening in that continuum, our universe would not simply pour out into it as time has moved faster here than there and at a rate were it has matched perfectly to the quantum evaporation of that black hole and by that point our relative time rate would match that of the parent continuum anyway as well as our space time having ceased to have any potential other than the original pin prick of time space trapped within the core of the black hole had to start with.

They are board LOL But let us Weight till the Universe Weighs in .
there is a much more accrete weight of the galaxy I came up with it my self .
Gigaplexialbobo .
Hey it has alest as much of a chance being close as there GUESS lol

a reply to: shawmanfromny
So, basically, "I don't understand how science works, so it's gotta be wrong". A very comfortable and self-assuring attitude to have from your computer chair.

Meanwhile, scientists send robotic spacecraft out into deep space, to randezvous with planets/moons/asteroids many years in the future, because they know how gravity works and how to measure it.

But yeah, do read the article: imgsrc.hubblesite.org...

a reply to: bobs_uruncle

Actually it says more about clickbait headlines and the need for journalists to get you to read their advertising backed articles than it does the actual research science on which the article is based.

a reply to: shawmanfromny

That's just a click-bait title, the article itself looks as correct as possible, except for the "billions" and "trillions", as they do not specify if those names are being used in the long or short scale.

Edited to add that, many years ago, I told an ATS member that, to get more views for his threads he should start adding two or three exclamation marks at the end of the title. He tried it and it worked, ATS members had a higher tendency of reading and commenting on the threads with two or three exclamation marks on their titles.

originally posted by: ArMaP
Edited to add that, many years ago, I told an ATS member that, to get more views for his threads he should start adding two or three exclamation marks at the end of the title. He tried it and it worked, ATS members had a higher tendency of reading and commenting on the threads with two or three exclamation marks on their titles.

"Scientists weighed the galaxy, and you won't believe what they found!!"

originally posted by: OneBigMonkeyToo
a reply to: bobs_uruncle

Actually it says more about clickbait headlines and the need for journalists to get you to read their advertising backed articles than it does the actual research science on which the article is based.

You're probably right because sometimes we tend to hunt down these "inaccuracies" for whatever personal reasons, thereby encountering the wall of ads :-)

Cheers - Dave

a reply to: shawmanfromny

Yep, some of the top scientists are wrong and some random on the internet is right /rolls_eyes

A little video that tells how they did it in a very simple way, in case anyone still needs a clarification:


www.youtube.com...

a reply to: shawmanfromny

The article itself seems fine, but they should have worded that better. Maybe "...More Accurately Weigh the Milky Way using newly-released data..."

or something like that, but less wordy. Their use of the word "accurate" seems to be more of a relative thing rather than treating it as an absolute term.

It seems to me that you're getting caught up on the semantics of the use of the word "accurate" when the article itself (once you get past the apparent misuse of the word) seems to show that the new study did at least some of their due diligence to come to their conclusions, using the new Gaia data at their disposal along with existing Hubble data.

originally posted by: bobs_uruncle
a reply to: shawmanfromny

These people dbl as the "guess your weight" hawkers at carnivals and circuses right? The use of the word accurate in this case tells a lot more about the new "consensus" driven idiot "science" than it does about any measurement.

Cheers - Dave

I doubt the scientists who did the research also wrote the article.

I mean, any schmo author could write a poorly-worded article about a specific bit of scientific research, but that doesn't mean the people who did the scientific research itself did a poor job.