Astronomers said Thursday they had accurately calculated the mass of the Milky Way for the first time, using new data sets that include the weight of dark matter. In a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency’s Gaia observation craft, a team of experts calculated our galaxy to be around 1.5 trillion solar masses. Pervious estimates put the mass of the Milky Way ranging between 500 billion and 3 trillion times the mass of the Sun.
