Dive deep into the dusty Milky Way
Perspective of the Milky Way galaxy as seen from Earth. Credit: ESO/S
An animated dive into the dusty Milky Way reveals the outline of our galaxy that formed as we looked further away from Earth.
Based on new data from an interactive tool that leverages data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission and other space science datasets, astronomers have created an animation to model the dust in the Milky Way. The work was presented this week at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2022) at the University of Warwick and published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The animation shows a visible cumulative dust buildup from Earth’s local environment up to ~13,000 light-years towards the galactic center—about 10% of the total distance across the Milky Way. Nearby, dust swirls around but, further away, the concentration of dust along the galactic plane becomes apparent. Two “windows”, one above and one below the galactic plane, were also revealed.
“Dust clouds are linked to star formation and death, so their distribution tells how structures formed in galaxies and how galaxies evolved,” said Nick Cox, coordinator of the EXPLORE project that developed the tool. “Maps are also important for cosmologists in revealing areas where there is no dust and we can have a clear, unobstructed view of the Milky Way to study the universe beyond it, such as to make Deep Field observations with Hubble or the new James Webb Space Telescope. .”
The tool used to create the animation combines data from the Gaia mission and the 2MASS All Sky Survey. The tool is part of a suite of applications designed to support the study of stars and galaxies, as well as lunar exploration, and has been developed through funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Program.
“Machine learning and advanced visual analytics have the power to greatly improve scientific returns and discoveries for space science missions, but their use is still relatively new in the field of astronomy,” said Albert Zijlstra, of the University of Manchester and the EXPLORE project.
“With a constant stream of new data, such as the third release of Gaia data as recently as June 2022, we have more and more information to mine—beyond the scope that humans can process in a lifetime. We need tools like that we developed EXPLORE to support scientific discoveries, such as by helping us characterize properties in data, or selecting the most interesting or unusual features and structures.”
Beyond the clouds: Discover the galaxy behind the galaxy
R. Lallement et al, Updated 3D Gaia-2MASS map of Galactic interstellar dust, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2022). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202142846
Provided by the Royal Astronomical Society
Quote: Dive deep into the dusty Milky Way (2022, 15 July) retrieved 15 July 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-07-deep-dusty-milky.html
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