---
title: "Scientists Can Now Weigh the Milky Way"
description: "Scientists used streams produced by dissolving globular clusters to measure the weight of our galaxy and determine the location of the sun within the Milky Way."
date: "2015-06-03"
modified: "2015-08-13"
authors:
  - name: "Angelie Hawks"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/ahawk"
url: "https://futurism.com/scientists-can-now-weigh-the-milky-way"
categories:
  - "Off-World"
  - "Space"
tags:
  - "space"
---

# Scientists Can Now Weigh the Milky Way

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/milkyway.jpg>)

- An international team of scientists led by Columbia University researcher Andreas Küpper used stars outside this disk, which orbit around the Milky Way in a stream-like structure, to weigh the Milky Way to high precision.
- The researchers used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which scanned the sky of the Northern Hemisphere for about 10 years to create a comprehensive catalog of stars in the sky. The stream they tested the new technique on was produced by a globular cluster named Palomar 5, and had already been discovered in 2001 high above the Galactic disk.
- In the future, the researchers aim to use more structures like the Palomar 5 stream to gain an even higher precision and to create the most realistic model of the Milky Way to date.