MW-Atlas: The first comprehensive Atlas of the Milky Way

The Milky Way is the cosmic environment in which the solar system, the Earth, and life as we know it came into being. It is also the veil through which we peer into the extra-galactic universe. Its dust obscures our view of the formation of the cosmos. Its magnetic fields distort the observations of nature's most powerful particle accelerators. Its structure and metabolism determine the great diversity of observed star and planetary systems, including our own. Due to a lack of distance information, currently most information about the structure of the Milky Way is two-dimensional, while three-dimensional information is needed. The mw-atlas project aims for a breakthrough in Galactic cartography and the science it enables,by creating the first comprehensive three-dimensional atlas of all the physical components of the Milky Way. The atlas will be self-consistent between component maps, quantify their remaining uncertainties, and be the most detailed to date.
mw-atlas is funded by an ERC Synergy grant, and it is jointly pursued by Vasiliki Pavlidou at IA-FORTH in Greece, Torsten Ensslin at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and Philipp Mertsch at RWTH Aachen University in Germany.