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.