Milky Way has only half the amount of dark matter as previously thought, scientists have found.
Australian astronomers used a method developed almost 100 years ago to discover that the weight of dark matter in our own galaxy is 800,000,000,000 times the mass of the Sun.
They probed the edge of the Milky Way, looking closely, for the first time, at the fringes of the galaxy about 5 million trillion kilometres from Earth.
Astrophysicist Dr Prajwal Kafle, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said we have known for a while that most of the Universe is hidden.
"Stars, dust, you and me, all the things that we see, only make up about 4 per cent of the entire Universe. About 25 per cent is dark matter and the rest is dark energy," he said.
Kafle, who is originally from Nepal, was able to measure the mass of the dark matter in the Milky Way by studying the speed of stars throughout the galaxy, including the edges, which had never been studied to this detail before.
He used a robust technique developed by British astronomer James Jeans in 1915 - decades before the discovery of dark matter.
Kafle's measurement helps to solve a mystery that has been haunting theorists for almost two decades.
"The current idea of galaxy formation and evolution, called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory, predicts that there should be a handful of big satellite galaxies around the Milky Way that are visible with the naked eye, but we don't see that," Kafle said.
"When you use our measurement of the mass of the dark matter the theory predicts that there should only be three satellite galaxies out there, which is exactly what we see; the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy," he said.
