DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11448780
title: All-sky three-dimensional dust density and extinction Maps of the Milky Way out to 2.8 kpc

description: Three-dimensional dust density maps are crucial for understanding the structure of the interstellar medium of the Milky Way and the processes that shape it. However, constructing these maps requires large datasets and the methods used to analyse them are computationally expensive and difficult to scale up. As a result it is has only recently become possible to map kiloparsec-scale regions of our Galaxy at parsec-scale grid sampling. We present all-sky three-dimensional dust density and extinction maps of the Milky Way out to 2.8~kpc in distance from the Sun using the fast and scalable Gaussian Process algorithm Dustribution. The sampling of the three-dimensional map is $l,b,d = 1^{\circ} \times1^{\circ} \times 1.7$~pc. The input extinction and distance catalogue contains 120 million stars with photometry and astrometry from Gaia DR2, 2MASS and AllWISE. This combines the strengths of optical and infrared data to probe deeper into the dusty regions of the Milky Way. We compare our maps with other published 3D dust maps. All maps quantitatively agree at the $0.001$~mag~pc$^{-1}$ scale with many qualitatively similar features, although each map also has its own features. We recover Galactic features previously identified in the literature. Moreover, we also see a large under-density that may correspond to an inter-arm or -spur gap towards the Galactic Centre.

 

Here we provide the full dataset generated from Dustribution covering the full sky out to 2.8 kpc. We provide the 3D dust extinction and density files as well the l,b,d coordinate grid that the data is presented in. 

 

The data in each file is as follows:



lbdGrid_l_bounds.pkl.npy: The boundaries of the grid cells of the merged map in l (degrees). Numpy array of size 881.

lbdGrid_b_bounds.pkl.npy: The boundaries of the grid cells of the merged map in b (degrees). Numpy array of size 273.

lbdGrid_d_bounds.pkl.npy: The boundaries of the grid cells of the merged map in d (pc). Numpy array of size 1644.

Density_Median_lbd.pkl.npy: The median of 100 density samples of the merged map (mag pc^-1). Treat this as the estimate of the density. Numpy array of size (880, 272, 1644)

Density_16P_lbd.pkl.npy: The 16th percentile of the density of the merged map (mag pc^-1). Treat median-16p as the estimate of the lower uncertainty on the density. Numpy array of size (880, 272, 1644)

Density_84P_lbd.pkl.npy: The 84th percentile of the density of the merged map (mag pc^-1). Treat 84p-median as the estimate of the upper uncertainty on the density. Numpy array of size (880, 272, 1644) 

Ext_Median_lbd.pkl.npy: The median of the integral of 100 sample maps at each cell in the merged map (mag). Treat this as the estimate of the extinction in each cell. Numpy array of size (880, 272, 1644). 

Ext_16P_lbd.pkl.npy: The 16th percentile of the integral of 100 sample maps at each cell in the merged map (mag). Treat median-16p as the estimate of the lower uncertainty on the extinction in each cell. Numpy array of size (880, 272, 1644)

Ext_84P_lbd.pkl.npy: The 84th percentile of the integral of 100 sample maps at each cell in the merged map (mag). Treat 84p-median as the estimate of the upper uncertainty on the extinction in each cell. Numpy array of size (880, 272, 1644)

read_and_plot.ipynb: a short jupyter notebook demonstrating how to read in the data files, with some quick examples of plotting them.