Reconstructing the History of the Milky Way Galaxy Using Stars

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• Melissa Ness, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA), Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
• Thursday 13 March 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Hoyle Lecture Theatre, IoA (tea at 3:30 pm).

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Astronomy of the Milky Way Galaxy has entered a transformative era. The Gaia mission and an ensemble of ground-based spectroscopic surveys are delivering element abundances and velocities for millions of stars. These data provide both an opportunity to deepen our understanding of galaxy formation and to test the “limits of knowledge.” There have been several surprises that have come out of the large stellar surveys and data-driven methodologies built to analyse them. We have learned that up to 1 in 100 stars in the disk are “abundance doppelgangers” – chemically identical but unrelated – limiting the prospect of reconstructing the disk’s star cluster building blocks. Furthermore, for stars in the disk, most of the element abundances measured for most of the stars can be predicted to a precision of better than 10 percent given only two key abundances. However, this is not the case for stars in the stellar halo. These findings frame how we can most effectively work with the data to turn photons into a quantified description of Galactic history and provide strong constraints on the star formation and mixing processes that have set the Galactic environment.

This talk is part of the The Eddington Lectures series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Astronomy Talks
• Combined External Astrophysics Talks DAMTP
• Cosmology lists
• Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity
• Hoyle Lecture Theatre, IoA (tea at 3:30 pm)
• Institute of Astronomy Colloquia
• Institute of Astronomy Talk Lists
• Kavli Institute for Cosmology Talk Lists
• Priscilla
• The Eddington Lectures

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