Weighing the Milky Way
Munawar Karim, Angelo Tartaglia, Ashfaque H. Bokhari
TL;DR
This paper proposes an experiment using light travel times in a Michelson interferometer to measure the Milky Way's mass, focusing on the gravitational effects of the Galactic center on spacetime.
Contribution
It introduces a novel method to estimate the Galactic mass via light travel time differences in the Schwarzschild metric, linking astrophysical measurements with interferometry.
Findings
Galactic center's mass affects light travel times at a measurable level
The contribution of the Galactic center to spacetime metric is quantified as 10^-6
An experimental setup is proposed to detect the gravitational effect using existing interferometry technology
Abstract
We describe an experiment to measure the mass of the Milky Way galaxy. The experiment is based on calculated light travel times along orthogonal directions in the Schwarzschild metric of the Galactic center. We show that the difference is proportional to the Galactic mass. We apply the result to light travel times in a 10cm Michelson type interferometer located on Earth. The mass of the Galactic center is shown to contribute 10^-6 to the flat space component of the metric. An experiment is proposed to measure the effect.
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