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Astronomy Colloquium Series

Dr. Sergey Koposov, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, McWilliams Center for Cosmology: Carnegie Mellon University
Thursday, March 15, 2018
3:40-4:30 PM
411 West Hall Map
“Galactic Archaeology in the Gaia Era”


Galactic archaeology is a field devoted to studies of the Milky Way's past by primarily looking at accretion events of various objects onto our Galaxy. This field has been rapidly evolving in the last 10 years due the advent of large photometric and spectroscopic surveys. These surveys have led to the discovery of a large number of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, stellar streams produced by disrupted satellites, as well as probed the structure of Milky Way stellar halo. Many of these discoveries provided significant new constraints on the past history of the Milky Way, physics of galaxy formation and nature and distribution of dark matter.

A major ongoing event for the galactic archaeology now is the Gaia mission that released its first data a year and half ago. Despite the fact that it included only a tiny portion of Gaia measurements, many exciting results have been obtained from it telling us new information about the disruption of the Large Magellanic Clouds, structure of the Milky Way halo and much more. These early results however are only teasing us about what will be possible with a much more extended second data release of Gaia that will become available in April this year and will certainly lead to a major frenzy of activity in the field.




Please note: Should you require any reasonable accommodations to ensure equal access and opportunity related to this event please contact Stacy Tiburzi at 734-764-3440 or stibu@umich.edu.
Building: West Hall
Website:
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Astronomy, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, Physics, Science
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Department of Astronomy, Department of Physics, Michigan Institute for Research in Astrophysics