About
Welcome to our visualization data science project. We have decided to visualize the stellar chemical distribution throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. To do so, chemical abundance measurements from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have been crossmatched with distance measurements from Gaia space craft and are displayed here to encourage exploration of the data. We wanted to start with something familiar to most science enthusiasts. In the upper left hand corner you see the periodic table which displays the atomic number and symbol. The color ratios overlaid each element indicate the percentage of contributions from a specific source, such as the big bang contributing to most of the Hydrogen and Helium we see today. Hovering over a specific element will display a tool tip with the name of the element, it's atomic mass, and the percentage from each source. Some elements are bordered green. These are elements that have chemical abundance measurements made by SDSS. When clicked the galaxy plot to the right will be colored to depict the chemical distribution of that element with respect to geographic location. Also note that the label below the chemical distribution plot will display the element name to remind the user which element is being displayed. Hovering over each bin in the chemical distribution plot will provide information about that bin, such as, the number stars in the bin, the average chemical enrichment of those stars, and more. This visual was created in hope to depict positional chemical patterns within the galaxy. Finally we have a scatter plot to explore different measurements of the data. The coloring can be changed to explore new patterns that are not available in the periodic table such as temperature. The x-axis and y-axis can be change to find new patterns between other attributes. A 2D-brush tool has been implemented to focus on how features may be distributed throughout the galaxy.
Galactic
Our initial thoughts on the galactic visual included an overlay atop a still figure. The goal of this visualization is to interact directly with the scatter plot. In brief the scatter plot will display all of the stars in the range of our Milky Way Galaxy and organize the stars (each represented by a single dot) depending on the user's axis adjustment. We let the user select the X and Y axis to see correlations of what they desire. Once they do this they have the ability to use a brush to select another range of stars in the galaxy. This selects the stars, highlights them in the scatter plot but also shows there positional relation on the Galactic Visual. This allows the user to see the accurate spatial relation of the stars they chose and correlated using specific terms. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has created the most detailed three-dimensional maps of the Universe ever made, with deep multi-color images of one third of the sky, and spectra for more than three million astronomical objects. Learn and explore all phases and surveys—past, present, and future—of the SDSS.
Periodic Table
The first visualization we began working on was the periodic table that will correlate to the chemical abundance in the stars. The periodic table is very informative and pulls data directly from an our APOGEE online data. The goal of this visualization was to give an overview description for the stars. Understanding the composition of the elements and where they arose cosmically either in the big bang fusion, cosmic ray fission, merging neutron stars, exploding massive stars, dying low mass stars, and exploding white dwarfs allows th user to develop mental notes for particular chemicals they would like to look into further. The colors of the tooltip interact with the colors on the periodic table. For example, if a chemical was mostly generated from a dying low mass star then the area within the periodic table representing the chemical will be full. The area consumed by a color directly responds to an event in which is was made. The next general progression is to input the chemicals they're interested into the scatter plot axes to view correlations in position, temperature, averager metallicity, size, and velocity in the stars. For this particular visualization we used data from https://github.com/andrejewski/periodic-table to make our perioudic table as professional as possible.
Scatter Plot
The scatter plot ended up being the last visualization we implemented. It is an interactive visual that connects directly to the galactic visualization. The user can interact to develop a scatter plot of a correlation they would like (described further in the project process book) with the color they would like, then using the brush tool they can drag across the screen to select a particular region of stars. This selection will then be showed in the galactic visualization where those selected stars are positional in the Milky Way Galaxy. This gives the user the ability to connect stars together based off a variety of variables all dependent on their specific preferences. This personalization gives each user a new and unique informational experience to the website.