An animated dive into the dusty Milky Way reveals the contours of our galaxy as it takes shape as we look further and further from Earth. Based on new data from an interactive tool that uses data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission and other space science datasets, astronomers have created an animation to model dust in the Milky Way. The work was presented this week at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2022) at the University of Warwick.The animation shows the cumulative dust accumulation as seen from Earth’s local neighborhood up to ~13,000 light-years towards the galactic center – about 10% of the total distance across the Milky Way. Nearby, dust swirls all around, but further along the galactic plane, the dust concentration clears. Two “windows” are also revealed, one above and one below the galactic plane.
“Dust clouds are related to the formation and extinction of stars, so their distribution tells the story of how structures formed in the galaxy and how the galaxy is evolving,” said Nick Cox, project coordinator for EXPLORE, which is developing the instruments. “The maps are also important for cosmologists in the revealing regions where there is no dust and we can have a clear, unobstructed view out of the Milky Way to study the universe beyond, for example with the Deep Field observations with HST or the new James Webb. A space telescope.”The tools used to create the animation combine data from the Gaia mission and the 2MASS All Sky Survey. The instruments are part of a suite of applications designed to support the study of stars and galaxies, as well as lunar exploration, and were developed with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme.
“State-of-the-art machine learning and visual analytics have the power to greatly improve science return and discovery for space science missions, but their use is still relatively new to the field of astronomy,” said Albert Zijlstra of the University of Manchester and the EXPLORE project. “With the constant flow of new data, such as the recent third release of Gaia data in June 2022, we have an ever-increasing amount of information to mine—beyond what humans could process in a lifetime. We need tools like the ones we are developing for EXPLORE to they have fostered scientific discovery, for example by helping us characterize features in data or pick out the most interesting or unusual features and structures.”
Image Credit: https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/deep-dive-dusty-milky-way
For more read: https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/deep-dive-dusty-milky-way
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