The history of the Milky Way's bar

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• Jason Sanders (UCL)
• Friday 14 February 2025, 11:30-12:30
• Ryle Seminar Room, KICC + online.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sandro Tacchella.

The emergence of barred galaxies is a sensitive indicator of the conditions in the early Universe. Current cosmological simulations now routinely produce realistic barred galaxies but reproducing the precise distributions of morphology and properties remains challenging. One route to understanding how bars form and evolve is to look close to home at our own Galaxy’s bar. I will describe work on measuring the epoch of bar formation in the Milky Way using data from Gaia and a ground-based astrometric catalogue VVV /VIRAC from the VISTA telescope. I will describe how the bar formation can be dated by studying the star formation history in the Milky Way’s nuclear stellar disc, a central structure intimately related to the bar, and describe the broader implications of the derived bar formation epoch for the history of our Galaxy.

This talk is part of the Galaxies Discussion Group series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Astronomy Talks
• Combined External Astrophysics Talks DAMTP
• Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity
• Galaxies Discussion Group
• Institute of Astronomy Talk Lists
• Kavli Institute for Cosmology Talk Lists
• Ryle Seminar Room, KICC + online

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