The California Molecular Cloud in 3D

This animation shows the California Molecular Cloud in a 3D reconstruction using 160,000 stars as extinction probes with precise distance estimates. The distance measurement is based on the Gaia EDR3 catalogue of stars. The x, y, z axes are given in parsecs with the earth being the zeropoint. The spatial resolution is 5 parsecs (15 light-years). Sara Rezaei Khoshbakht from MPIA and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, has developed a method using Gaia data to infer the 3D dust density of molecular clouds. Rezaei Khoshbakht and Jouni Kainulainen from Chalmers published the data visualised in this animation. The results have been published in: Sara Rezaei Kh. and Jouni Kainulainen, “3D shape explains star formation mystery of California and Orion A”, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2022). The modelling method is described in: S. Rezaei Kh., C. A. L. Bailer-Jones, R. J. Hanson and M. Fouesneau, “Inferring the three-dimensional distribution of dust in the