Dr. Sven Buder
(Australian National University and ASTRO 3D ARC Centre of Excellence)

Thursday, 7th of December, at 16:15, in the seminar room of the Astrophysical Institute (Schillergäßchen 2) in Jena.

Galactic Archaeology: Using stars as fossils to explore formation history of our Milky Way

Abstract:

The life-story of our Milky Way is missing key pages! In our ever-evolving Galaxy, our best hope is to use long-lived stars as time capsules.  The industrial revolution of equipment in Galactic archaeology allows us to survey the stars of our Milky Way in unprecedented depth and detail. The Gaia satellite monitors the positions and motions of billions of stars, while ground-based surveys like our Australian-led GALAH survey take millions of stellar spectra. I will present the innovative tools that we have developed to extract information for millions of high-resolution optical spectra and how we can use stellar chemistry, dynamics, and ages to tell apart populations in the Milky Way and even identify stellar survivors of previous mergers. Putting these findings into an extragalactic and cosmological context will forge the connections to understand galaxy evolution across the Universe.