The Sun orbits the Milky Way’s center about every 230 million years. As it travels, it also bobs up and down through the Galaxy’s gravitational mid-plane roughly every 30 million years. During one 25-kpc-long solar orbit, the Milky Way through which the Sun cruises is constantly rearranging itself. Stars and clusters of stars form; massive stars explode and blow huge bubbles; new concentrations of interstellar gas form, leading to the formation of more stars, and more explosions; and radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum spews from these processes. What’s more, all of these processes unfold simultaneously, on timescales ranging from 1 to 100 million years, across the Galaxy. The result is that any star—including our Sun—encounters a dramatically evolving view of its galactic environment as it orbits. Most of a star’s time is spent in “empty space,” but the density and radiation fields it experiences can change sharply on occasion. Why care about this? From a physics point of view, imagining—and calculating--what one star sees as it orbits in a galaxy requires excellent, observationally constrained, simulations of a host of gravitational, kinematic, and radiative processes. If these calculations can be made realistic, they can also be used to consider how much the "galactic weather" around a star matters to the planets and civilizations that may have formed around it. From a pure human curiosity and "wonder" point of view, it will be an amazing achievement to make a data-driven movie looking out a quarter-of-a-billion years into the future.
In this talk, I will showcase the tremendous range of astronomical, data science, and visualization advances over the past decade that make it possible to create "a 3D model of the Milky Way that will offer a tour." I will frame these developments through the structure of a new website designed to share everything we know about the Galaxy’s 3D structure—both as data and as interactive visualization—MilkyWay3D.org.
Alyssa's talk is available on her website here: https://agoodman.scholars.harvard.edu/publication/once-around-milky-way-building-out-3d-model-milky-way-will-offer-tour.
