Seeing the Milky Way in 3D (CIERA Colloquium)

Presentation Date: April 7, 2025
Location: CIERA Colloquium at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

Over just the past five years, 3D dust mapping, largely enabled by Gaia, has revealed fully unexpected new phenomena, like "The Radcliffe Wave" connecting dozens of star-forming molecular clouds in a 2.7-kpc-long structure that is oscillating vertically through the Galactic plane, while also verifying long-standing hypotheses that had never been clearly observable, such as the formation of molecular clouds on the surface of supernova-driven bubbles like the Local Bubble. 

Exploratory visualization software has been instrumental in contextualizing various 3D dust maps with other 3D measurements (e.g., Gaia-based stellar clustering and motions, radio spectral-line data) as well as with 2D imagery, catalogs of various features (e.g. HII regions), and more. The visualization efforts enabling MilkyWay3D.org offer an astronomy-oriented demonstration of the broader "LIVE Environments" effort, which seeks to bring Linkable Interactive Visualization and Exploration Environments to scientists, educators, and learners across astronomy, biology, and geographic information systems. 

Several of the specific software packages and connections between them that underlay LIVE Environments and Milky Way 3D will be discussed and demonstrated, including glue, glupyter, OpenSpace, WorldWide Telescope, JupyterLab, Solara, plot.ly, and augmented reality tools. Ongoing application of the LIVE software stack within the "Cosmic Data Stories" data science education project will also be demonstrated.

This presentation was given at the CIERA Colloquium at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, on April 7, 2025.