Mapping the Milky Way in 5D with 170 Million Stars

• Published in: The Astrophysical journal 2024-08, Vol.970 (2), p.121
• Main Authors: Speagle, Joshua S., Zucker, Catherine, Bonaca, Ana, Cargile, Phillip A., Johnson, Benjamin D., Beane, Angus, Conroy, Charlie, Finkbeiner, Douglas P., Green, Gregory M., Kamdar, Harshil M., Naidu, Rohan, Rix, Hans-Walter, Schlafly, Edward F., Dotter, Aaron, Eadie, Gwendolyn, Eisenstein, Daniel J., Goodman, Alyssa A., Han, Jiwon Jesse, Saydjari, Andrew K., Ting, Yuan-Sen, Zelko, Ioana A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Estimates; Extinction; Infrared photometry; Milky Way; Parallax; Parameter estimation; Photometry; Sky surveys; Stellar distance; the Milky Way
• ISSN: 0004-637X; 1538-4357
• DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad2b62

We present Augustus , a catalog of distance, extinction, and stellar parameter estimates for 170 million stars from 14 mag < r < 20 mag and with ∣ b ∣ > 10° drawing on a combination of optical to near-infrared photometry from Pan-STARRS, 2MASS, UKIDSS, and unWISE along with parallax measurements from Gaia DR2 and 3D dust extinction maps. After applying quality cuts, we find 125 million objects have “high-quality” posteriors with statistical distance uncertainties of ≲10% for objects with well-constrained stellar types. This is a substantial improvement over the distance estimates derived from Gaia parallaxes alone and in line with the recent results from Anders et al. We find the fits are able to reproduce the dereddened Gaia color–magnitude diagram accurately, which serves as a useful consistency check of our results. We show that we are able to detect large, kinematically coherent substructures in our data clearly relative to the input priors, including the Monoceros Ring and the Sagittarius Stream, attesting to the quality of the catalog. Our results are publicly available at doi: 10.7910/DVN/WYMSXV . An accompanying interactive visualization can be found at http://allsky.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com .