I went to the “DPG Spring Meeting 2025 of the Matter and Cosmos Section (SMuK)” at the University of Göttingen. I did my Bachelors at this university, and being back there after several years sparked a lot of nostalgia.
The university presented itself from its best side, with beautiful spring weather and blooming cherry trees everywhere on campus.
Göttingen was home to many famous scientists, many of whom obtained a Nobel prize at some point in their careers. Going about the city cemeteries, one stumbles upon the graves of Otto Hahn, Max Planck, Max Born, Karl Schwarzschild, David Hilbert, and Carl Friedrich Gauss among others.
It is quite humbling to be surrounded by so much scientific history concentrated in one place – imagine what Göttingen could have been today if the Nazi regime and the second world war had not happened.
I gave a short 12-minute talk about my paper on mapping the neutral hydrogen gas in the Milky Way.
Title: Spatially Coherent 3D Distributions of HI and CO in the Milky Way
Abstract: The spatial distribution of the gaseous components of the Milky Way is of great importance for a number of different fields, for example, Galactic structure, star formation, cosmic rays, and diffuse emission. We used three-dimensional (3D) Gaussian processes to model correlations in the interstellar medium, including correlations between different lines of sight, and enforce a spatially coherent structure in the prior. We inferred the spatial distributions of atomic hydrogen (HI), carbon monoxide (CO), their emission line widths, and the Galactic velocity field in a joint Bayesian inference from multiple datasets, mainly Doppler-shifted line emission. Our main result consists of a set of samples that implicitly contain statistical uncertainties. We confirm previous findings regarding the warping and flaring of the Galactic disc. A comparison with 3D dust maps reveals a good agreement on scales larger than approximately 400 pc. While our results are not free of artefacts, they present a big step forward in obtaining high-quality 3D maps of the interstellar medium.
Authors: Laurin Söding, Gordian Edenhofer, Torsten A. Enßlin, Philipp Frank, Ralf Kissmann, Vo Hong Minh Phan, Andrés Ramírez, Hanieh Zandinejad, and Philipp Mertsch
When: 03rd of April 2025
Where: Göttingen, Germany
This is a link to information about my talk on the conference-webpage. Below, you can find the slides of my presentation in pdf format: