Mapping Stars and Dust in the Milky Way

Speaker: Doug Finkbeiner (Harvard) In Person and zoom

Zoom Recording Passcode: DF8&fcCk

Understanding the 3-D positions and motions of stars and dust in the Milky Way is a prerequisite for many astronomical analyses, but it is challenging.  Recent data from Gaia, SDSS-APOGEE, and the Finkbeiner Group's own 3.3 billion star DECaPS survey have allowed us to make such maps in ever greater detail.  Absorption of light from the stars not only reveals the locations of clouds, but the Diffuse Interstellar Band (DIB) absorption provides cloud velocities with an error floor of ~3 km/s.  Upcoming surveys from Roman, SPHEREx, and LSST will provide another leap forward.  I will show our latest data products (including a 3-D dust map with 1 arcminute angular resolution!) and describe what we can hope to see in the next few years.