Prajwal Kafle

A team of University of Sydney astronomers, led by a Nepali PhD student, Prajwal Kafle, and his collaborators, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Geraint Lewis and Sanjib Sharma have shown that the Milky Way is a lot slimmer than we previously thought.

Like all galaxies, the mass of The Milky Way Galaxy dominated by an immense "dark halo" that can only be studied through detecting its huge gravitational pull, and our location, deep in the disk of the Milky Way, makes detecting this large scale pull very difficult.

The dark halo is comprised of dark matter, the dominant form of matter in the Universe, and in the early 1970s, Australian researcher, Ken Freeman of the Mount Stromlo Observatory realised it actually dominates motion of individual stars, including our Sun. This work was recently rewarded with Prof. Freeman receiving the Prime Minister's Prize for Science.

"Living inside the Milky Way provides some unique opportunities to estimate how much dark matter there is in the dark halo of a typical large spiral", said Prof. Ken Freeman.

But just how much dark matter surrounds our home Galaxy? And how is it distributed? We still struggle to answer these questions, but they became the target of Kafle's research.

He called on a technique derived by British astronomer, James Jeans, in 1915 to attempt to weigh the amount of dark matter. While the approach is mathematically robust, it requires the detection of very distant stars in the halo.

"There were so many assumptions going into those calculations, I would take almost all the previous estimates that use this technique with a pinch of salt," said Kafle.

"I turned to a massive survey of the sky, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, delivering an unprecedented view of our Milky Way. This magnificent survey means we can do away with many of the previous assumptions," said Kafle.

Prof. Ken adds "Kafle's new analysis uses robust techniques, and the sample of tracer stars is much larger than anyone has used before. His new estimate is a big step forward from previous work."

To make the calculation more accurate, Prajwal used the speeds of the stars, as measured by the Doppler effect, to see how fast they are moving in the halo. With this, the Jeans's technique revealed that the mass of dark matter within 0.8 million light years radius of our Galaxy is almost half the amount reported previously, weighing 1.2 trillion times that of the mass of the Sun.

While this represents one of the most accurate measurement, Kafle admits that "The uncertainties in the quoted number is still around 30%. But this is an indication of how well we understand the amount of mass in the Milky Way".

"This is challenging work", said Prajwal's supervisor, Professor Geraint Lewis, "but it is great to uncover how much dark matter is there in the Milky Way, one of the great astronomical mysteries."

Now, Prajwal is looking forward to settle the controversy about the rotating stellar components in the Halo, where it appears that there are two populations of stars moving in opposite directions and its direct implication on the formation history of our Galaxy.

After 3 years of devoted work far far away from his home and family in Nepal, Kafle said, "It was worth traveling all the way from the roof of the world, Nepal, to the country with beaches, BBQs and snags. With icons of the Dark Force, Prof. Ken Freeman and Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt around, I am more motivated as I push our understanding one step further." nepalnews.com