The evolution history of our Milky Way

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• Payel Das (Oxford)
• Wednesday 06 December 2017, 13:00-14:00
• Physics West SR1 (103).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sean McGee.

In our Milky Way, we are in a privileged position to be able to view individual stars. European Space Agency’s Gaia mission is observing a billion of these stars, measuring their parallaxes and in-plane velocities, giving us a direct view of secular evolution processes that shape galaxy discs, and the smallest galaxies in the Universe that build up the stellar halo. A myriad of ground-based spectroscopic surveys such as APOGEE , LAMOST, and WEAVE will supplement these data with line-of-sight velocities and abundance ratios, and asteroseismological surveys such as Kepler will measure their masses. I will discuss how we can synthesise these data to estimate ages of the stars and then weave together a picture of the evolution history of our Milky Way using chemodynamical maps called ‘extended distribution functions’. This detailed chemodynamical characterization will help me constrain the heating and migration history of the Milky Way discs, the likelihood of separate formation histories for the thick and thin discs, and the assembly history of the stellar halo.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Talks Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Astrophysics Talks Series
• Bham Talks
• Physics West SR1 (103)
• What's on in Physics?

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