Dustribution - 3D dust density and extinction maps of the Milky Way

by Thavisha Dharmawardena

Introduction

Dustribution is a user-friendly open source algorithm built of Gaussian Processes and GPU technologies which takes in extinction and distances from any catalogue of stellar parameters to produce 3D maps of extinction and dust densities for user-selected regions.

Publications

  • Three-dimensional dust density structure of the Orion, Cygnus X, Taurus, and Perseus star-forming regions
    Dharmawardena et al., A&A 658, A166 (2022); arXiv:2111.06672 [astro-ph.GA]
  • The three-dimensional structure of galactic molecular cloud complexes out to 2.5 kpc
    Dharmawardena et al., MNRAS 519, 228 (2022); arxiv:2210.03615 [astro-ph.GA]
  • All-sky three-dimensional dust density and extinction Maps of the Milky Way out to 2.8 kpc
    MNRAS; arxiv:2406.06740 [astro-ph.GA]

The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/Thavisha/Dustribution.

Dataset

Select one of the Molecular Cloud Complexes and investigate its density and extinction graphs as well as its 3d structure using volume rendering.

Info:
Galactic longitudes ℓ
Galactic latitudes b
Distance range

Density and Extinction graphs

Volume rendering

Config
Mode
Factor
Gamma
Mouse control: rotate camera (LMB), pan view (RMB), zoom (MMB)

Augmented Reality Poster

The iso-surface rendering of the individual cloud complexes can also be inspected using AR. For that, print out the following poster and open this link with your mobile device. At each marker, a simplified version of the iso-surface can be seen.


Download poster as pdf (2.5 MiB).

Fullsky View

Mouse control: rotate gal. lon. (LMB), rotate gal. lat. (Shift+LMB)

3D rendering of Dust Density Map

Downloads

Data files can be downloaded from Zenodo. For that, click on the individual DOI number.

  • The three-dimensional structure of Galactic molecular cloud complexes out to 2.5 kpc
    DOI
  • All-sky three-dimensional dust density and extinction Maps of the Milky Way out to 2.8 kpc
    DOI

Eos Cloud



3D rendering of the Eos cloud and Solar Neighbourhood Dust Distribution

Click on the image to start the interactive app.
But note that, because of the size of 119MiB, loading may take a few minutes (depending on your internet connection)