A Three-Dimensional Map of Milky-Way Dust

Understand

We present a three-dimensional map of interstellar dust reddening, covering three-quarters of the sky out to a distance of several kiloparsecs, based on Pan-STARRS 1 and 2MASS photometry.

• The map reveals a wealth of detailed structure, from filaments to large cloud complexes.
• The map has a hybrid angular resolution, with most of the map at an angular resolution of 3.4' to 13.7', and a maximum distance resolution of ~25%.
• The three-dimensional distribution of dust is determined in a fully probabilistic framework, yielding the uncertainty in the reddening distribution along each line of sight, as well as stellar distances, reddenings and classifications for 800 million stars detected by Pan-STARRS 1.