VIALACTEA · VIALACTEA - The Milky Way as a Star Formation Engine

VIALACTEA will bring to a common forum the major new-generation surveys of the Galactic Plane from 1um to the radio, both in thermal continuum and in atomic and molecular lines, from Europe-funded space missions and ground-based facilities, to engage one of the fundamental challenges in Galactic astronomy: to quantify Galaxy-wide the relationship between the physical agents responsible for the onset and the regulation of star formation in a spiral galaxy and the resulting Rate and Efficiency of star formation, and obtain a ""star formation recipe"" that will be a cornerstone to trace the star formation history of galaxies back to their formation. The new state-of-the-art Milky Way paradigm is offering today, for the first time, the possibility to deploy a coherent science analysis methodology that can be uniformly applied from the Galactic Center to the outskirts of the Galaxy. A homogeneous and inter-calibrated evolutionary classification of the cold and dense clumps hosting young forming clusters at a variety of evolutionary stages will allow to deliver a new 3D model of the Galaxy, mapping the essential critical parameters like column density thresholds, rate and efficiency of star formation in the GalaxyTo make such an analysis possible in a timely and effective fashion, we will develop a suite of next-generation 3D-visualization tools that will integrate visual analytics, on-the-fly handling of multi-SED radiative transfer modeling and data mining/machine-learning technologies to incorporate the astronomer's know-how into a set of supervised workflows with decision making capabilities.The focus on research and analysis of data obtained from European space missions in combination with data from Europe-funded ground facilities, will enable time-effective exploitation of steradiant-scale multi-wavelength Galactic Plane surveys through new 3D-based visual analytics frameworks, making VIALACTEA's objectives timely and totally relevant for FP7-SPACE-2013-1.""