VIDEO Dive into the dusty Milky Way

July 15 () –

Based on new data from an interactive tool that exploits, among others, data from ESA’s Gaia mission, astronomers have created an animation to model the dust in the Milky Way.

This animated dip into the dusty Milky Way reveals the outlines of our galaxy taking shape as we look further and further away from Earth.

The animation ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2hwjD5D7L0&t=40s )shows the cumulative accumulation of dust looking from Earth’s local neighborhood out to about 13,000 light-years toward the galactic center, about 10% of the total distance through the Milky Way. Up close, dust swirls around them, but farther away, the concentration of dust along the galactic plane becomes clear. Two ‘windows’ are also revealed, one above and one below the galactic plane.

“Dust clouds are related to the formation and death of stars, so their distribution tells the story of how structures in the galaxy formed and how the galaxy evolves,” he said. it’s a statement Nick Cox, coordinator of the EXPLORE project that is developing the tools. “The maps are also important to cosmologists by revealing regions where there is no dust and we can have a clear, unobstructed view of the Milky Way to study the Universe beyond. What to make deep-field observations with Hubble or the new Webb Space Telescope.

The tools used to create the animation combine data from the Gaia mission and the 2MASS All Sky Survey. The tools are part of a suite of applications designed to support star and galaxy studies, as well as lunar exploration, and have been developed with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme.

“Next-generation machine learning and visual analytics have the power to greatly enhance scientific return and discovery for space science missions, but its 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 Gaia’s recent third data release in June 2022, we have a growing wealth of information to mine, beyond the scope of what humans could process in their lifetime. We need tools like those we are developing for EXPLORE to support scientific discovery, such as helping us characterize properties within data, or to select the most interesting or unusual structures and features.”