The Milky Way galaxy is our home, cradle of our solar system and life as we know it. It is also a veil through which we observe the distant universe and therefore needs to be understood in order to sharpen our view into the cosmos. It contains dark matter, stars, gas, dust, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, turbulent velocities, all interacting through a network of physical processes. The three-dimensional structure of these contents is either the protagonist or a major source of noise in all cutting-edge astrophysics research, whether we are talking about the search of the beginnings of our Universe, the nature of dark matter or the origin of stars and of the highest-energy particles in the cosmos.

Although we have been collecting data on the Milky Way for decades, most information is still two-dimensional: we perceive the 3D Galaxy only as a 2D projection on the celestial sphere. Using the framework of Information Field Theory we can combine the wealth of existing data on the Milky Way to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of all of its ingredients. The maps of the Milky Way ingredients will result from physics-informed reconstructions. Although physical interactions between ingredients complicate the reconstruction, they are key to unlock the third dimension for the atlas. These interactions allow us to use objects at known distances to localize more elusive ones that were observed to interact with the former. If we successfully complete the mw-atlas, ten years from now there will hardly be any aspect of astrophysical research that will not be using the atlas. We hope it will enable groundbreaking science in ways we cannot even imagine yet.

Principal investigators

• Torsten Enßlin (MPA Garching)
• Philipp Mertsch (RWTH Aachen University)
• Vasiliki Pavlidou (IA-FORTH Heraklion)

Postdocs

• Jakob Roth (MPA Garching)
• Namita Uppal (IA-FORTH Heraklion)

Associates

• Philipp Frank (Stanford University)

Currently, there are no openings.