Using the new method and data from the Gaia Space Telescope, astronomers from the University of Toronto calculated the speed at which the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, as well as how far our star is from the center of the galaxy.
Judging by the results obtained, the speed of the Sun around the center of the Milky Way is 240 km / s. Then astronomers calculated how far we are from the galactic nucleus. If anything, the flight will take a long time: 7.9 kiloparsecs, or almost 26,000 light years.
Using data from Gaia and the Radial Velocity Experiment, Jason Hunt and colleagues have determined the velocities of over 200,000 stars relative to the Sun. At first, the study was not surprising, some stars moved faster, others slower, but astronomers also found a lack of stars with galactic orbital speeds of about 240 km / s less than the speed of the Sun. Astronomers concluded that the missing stars are stars with zero angular momentum, that is, they circle in the galaxy differently from the Sun or other stars.
“By measuring the speed at which nearby stars orbit the galaxy relative to the sun,” says Hunt, “we can observe a lack of stars at a specific negative relative speed. This is how we calculate how fast we ourselves are moving.”Then Hunt and colleagues combined this finding with the true speed of a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A, which is located in the center of the galaxy, and derived a distance of 7.9 kiloparsecs. True motion is the movement of an object across the sky relative to distant background objects. Scientists have calculated the distance in the same way that cartographers calculate the distance to an object, observing it from two different positions, the distance between which is known.
The study is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.