VIALACTEA: the Milky Way as a Star Formation Engine
Titolo: VIALACTEA: the Milky Way as a Star Formation Engine
Relatore: Dott. Fabio Vitello (INAF, OACT)
Coordinate: giovedì 16 febbraio 2017, ore 11:00, aula ovest OACT
Abstract: The Milky Way Galaxy, our home, is a complex ecosystem where a cyclical transformation process brings diffuse baryonic matter into dense unstable condensations to form stars, that produce radiant energy for billions of years before releasing chemically enriched material back into the ISM in their final stages of evolution. Star formation is the trigger of this process, eventually driving the evolution of ordinary matter in the Universe from its primordial composition to the present-day chemical diversity necessary for the birth of life.
The VIALACTEA project incorporates in a consistent and interoperable framework all major last-generation Galactic Plane surveys from the mid-infrared to the radio, in continuum and spectroscopy, to deliver a transformational view of our Milky Way Galaxy. From diffuse ISM clouds, through a pervasive network of filamentary structures, down to the formation of dense clumps, the VIALACTEA surveys trace the morphology and physics of dust structures at all spatial scales from the individual star formation site to the panoramic view of entire spiral arms. VIALACTEA deploys a homogeneous analysis and classification scheme for nearly 30,000 candidate filamentary structures and more than 100,000 dense clumps with heliocentric distance determinations. We are now able to complete the first resolved map of the Star Formation Rate in the Milky Way and analyse in detail its variation with Galactocentric distance and with respect to spiral arms, as well as in comparison to star formation triggering agents.
The suite of Galactic Plane surveys images, data cubes and catalogues in VIALACTEA constitutes a Knowledge-Base augmented with metadata information that allows seamless data discovery over very inhomogeneous datasets. A new Visual Analytics application will be demonstrated to access, visualise in 3D and analyse the VIALACTEA Knowledge-base. The interactive application allows navigation throughout the entire Plane with several selection, download and visualisation options to analyse continuum maps on top of distributions of compact sources from catalogues with the possibility to visualise the Spectral Energy Distributions and fit theoretical models. Finally, the 3D datacube visualization allows the analysis of spectral data cubes with the possibility to generate iso-contour images and overall onto continuum maps to very the kinematic coherence of filamentary structures and ISM clouds.