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The first… Google maps of our Galaxy is being designed by a research team, in which the Institute of Astrophysics of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) participates. For this ambitious project, the team will receive a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
The project, named “mw-atlas” with a total budget of ten million euros, aims to create the first three-dimensional, comprehensive atlas of our Galaxy, which is expected to drastically change the way we observe and understand the Universe.
The co-heads of the team are Vasiliki Pavlidou, a collaborating faculty member at FORTH and professor at the Department of Physics at the University of Crete, Dr. Torsten Enslin from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, and Professor Philipp Mertz from RWTH Aachen University in Germany.
“The difference that Google Maps has made in our lives is that it not only tells us where the roads are, but also where the hotels, restaurants, subway, bus stops are. So in any foreign city you go, you know the locations of the elements, but also the ways they dynamically interconnect, that is, the functional links between different points. This is what we are trying to construct with the three-dimensional map of our Galaxy: not only to say where everything is, where the stars are in three-dimensional space, the dust, the gas, the dark matter, but also how these interact with each other. This alone will in some way tell us the metabolism of the Galaxy: how stars and planets are formed, where life might be created, what the nature of dark matter might be,” Pavlidou explains to AMNA.
A major innovation of the atlas will be its three-dimensional nature. As Philipp Mertz, professor at the Institute of Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology at RWTH, notes, “Our Galaxy is extremely complex. It contains dark matter, stars, gases, dust, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, turbulent velocities, all of which interact through a network of physical processes. Even though the physical interactions among components complicate the reconstruction, they are the key to unlocking the third dimension for the atlas.” Pavlidou emphasizes to AMNA: “In astronomy all our observations are two-dimensional projections. We have absolutely no sense of depth. Only in the last decade has this really begun to change with the measurement by the European Gaia mission of the distances of a billion stars. Thus, the stars are this component within the Galaxy, with which we can measure depth, distances. All our other observations are in two dimensions, meaning they are projections on a screen without depth.” “With the unlocking of depth for the stars,” she continues, “what we can do is use physical processes to transfer the depth information from the stars, where we measure it directly, to the other elements of the Galaxy. This is such an unimaginably big step forward, that for a myriad of problems we faced at the forefront of Astrophysics research only indirectly, we can now directly, if we have a three-dimensional map, read the solution.” Many are the open questions that researchers hope to answer through the creation of the atlas, but the creation of the Universe and the nature of dark matter hold a prominent place. As the project’s coordinator and head of the Field Information Theory group at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Dr. Torsten Enslin, notes, “Our Galaxy is a veil through which we observe the distant Universe and therefore it must be understood in order to ‘cleanse’ our observations from the noise it causes.” “Only if we know the exact three-dimensional structure of the Galaxy will we be able to distinguish what comes from the young Universe and what comes from the Galaxy and see if there is an imprint of the first moments, the first inflationary expansion that occurred in the first billionth of a billionth of the first second of the Universe’s life,” Pavlidou describes to AMNA. Regarding the nature of dark matter, Pavlidou points out that “by doing the three-dimensional mapping of all the elements of the Galaxy and especially its gravitational field, we will be able to have a direction towards where to look for new dark matter particles, depending on whether they are of small or large mass”. The “mw-atlas” project will begin in 2025 and will be implemented over the next six years. Researchers calculate that intermediate results every two years will be able to answer specific astrophysical questions. As the project of creating the atlas is enormous and the three-dimensional reconstruction of astronomical data is extremely complex, the researchers have set their goal to transfer the algorithms developed for this project to other fields, such as medical imaging, Earth’s climate monitoring, and industrial data analysis.
The link with the PASIPHAE project
The project is linked with another major program running at the Institute of Astrophysics of FORTH with previous ERC funding. This is the PASIPHAE project aiming to map the magnetic field of our Galaxy, which is a major source of “noise” for the cosmic microwave background radiation, i.e., the portrait of the “infant” Universe. PASIPHAE will also start in 2025 and will include twin pioneering instruments (polarimeters), built with the sponsorship of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation specifically for the program at the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) lab in India. The two polarimeters will be placed in South Africa and at the Skinakas Observatory in Crete.
Partners of PASIPHAE are FORTH and the University of Crete, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), IUCAA, the South African Astronomical Observatory, and the University of Oslo in Norway. The scientific leader of the specific project is Professor Kostas Tassis of the University of Crete and a researcher at FORTH.
The 2024 Synergy Grants
It is noted that in the 2024 call for “ERC Synergy Grants”, besides “mw-atlas”, 56 other research projects were distinguished. The 57 projects will receive a total of 571 million euros to address some of the most complex scientific problems across a broad range of fields. The grants, which aim to enhance collaboration among researchers, are part of the EU’s “Horizon Europe” research and innovation program.
Among the distinguished projects, there are 201 researchers who will implement them in 184 universities and research centers in 24 countries across Europe and beyond. Twenty-two of the groups include a researcher based outside Europe (USA, Switzerland, Australia, and for the first time the Republic of Korea). Almost 32% of researchers participating in the 57 projects are women, and according to the European Research Council, this is the highest percentage since the program began. Six research teams consist entirely of female researchers.
Maria Kouzinopoulou