According to the new work, presented May 31 at a Canadian Astronomical Society conference in Winnipeg, the Milky Way contains the same amount of mass as 700 billion suns—and that puts it on the slimmer side of the scale. At the same time, our galaxy seems to contain slightly more dark matter than previously calculated. This mysterious invisible substance is thought to exist in a cloud around the Milky Way. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/milky-way-galaxy-mass-billion-suns-stars-clusters-space/
What reason do you have to doubt its authenticity? http://phys.org/news/2016-05-milky-massive-problem-solution.html extract: Eadie, a PhD candidate in physics and astronomy at McMaster University, has been studying the mass of the Milky Way and its dark matter component since she started graduate school. She uses the velocities and positions of globular star clusters that orbit the Milky Way. The orbits of globular clusters are determined by the galaxy's gravity, which is dictated by its massive dark matter component. What's new about Eadie's research is the technique she devised for using globular cluster (GCs) velocities. The total velocity of a GC must be measured in two directions: one along our line-of-sight, and one across the plane of the sky (the proper motion). Unfortunately, researchers have not yet measured the proper motions of all the GCs around the Milky Way. Eadie, however, has developed a way to use these velocities that are only partially known, in addition to the velocities that are fully known, to estimate the mass of the galaxy. Her method also predicts the mass contained within any distance from the center of the galaxy, with uncertainties, which makes her results easy to compare with other studies. Eadie and her academic supervisor William Harris, a professor of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster, have co-authored a paper on their most recent findings, which allow dark matter and visible matter to have different distributions in space. They have submitted this work to the Astrophysical Journal, and Eadie will present their results May 31 at the Canadian Astronomical Society's conference in Winnipeg. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-milky-massive-problem-solution.html#jCp Such calculations naturally though will have error bars
It looks like a false dichotomy, implying that calculations "on paper" are not "real" science. If so, that would imply the questioner fails to understand the role of theoretical calculation in science.
