Abstract: The current view of the local Milky Way is in crisis. Data from the ESA Gaia mission has overthrown the 150-year-old paradigm for the organization of the star-forming gas in the local neighborhood and the structure of stellar clusters and associations. In the new view, local star-forming regions are connected by lower-density gas and are part of a new organizational unit: undulating, coherent, and narrow Galactic-scale gas structures. While these new structures are likely associated with spiral arms, they do not fit the current model of the Milky Way. Open stellar clusters are far from the round stellar structures we thought they were, and instead have long, cigar-shaped coronae surrounding them. The once clear line between stellar cluster and stellar association is fading, if there at all. In this talk, I will present the new paradigm and the challenges and opportunities it poses to our understanding of the Milky Way and star and planet formation. I will also present the preliminary results from ESO Public Survey VISIONS, a large observational effort to map the local gas in the NIR focusing on a series of ISM and star formation topics, including making the first measurement of the 3D space motion of interstellar gas and construct a spatio-temporal atlas of the local gas. I will end with early results on "Galactic Weather", meaning the currently unknown relation between mass extinction or climate change events on Earth and the Sun's crossing of dense clouds and spiral arms, made possible by our preliminary measurements of the ISM 3D motion.

 Acknowledgements:

This event is part of the grant CEX2019-000918-M funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.