LBNL: New Study Maps Space Dust in 3-D

[bystander]

New Study Maps Space Dust in 3-D
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | 2017 Mar 22

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Berkeley Lab-led research raises new questions about properties of dust in local and distant reaches of Milky Way

Consider that the Earth is just a giant cosmic dust bunny—a big bundle of debris amassed from exploded stars. We Earthlings are essentially just little clumps of stardust, too, albeit with very complex chemistry.

And because outer space is a very dusty place, that makes things very difficult for astronomers and astrophysicists who are trying to peer farther across the universe or deep into the center of our own galaxy to learn more about their structure, formation and evolution. ...

[list]This animation shows a 3-D rendering of dust, as viewed in a several-kiloparsec (thousands of light years) loop through and out of the Milky Way's galactic plane.

This animation is made available through a Creative Commons License. (Credit: Gregory M. Green, Stanford/KIPAC)[/list]

Mapping the Extinction Curve in 3D: Structure on Kiloparsec Scales - E. F. Schlafly et al

• Astrophysical Journal 838(1):36 (20 Mar 2017) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa619d
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1612.02818 > 08 Dec 2017