Neige Frankel is a postdoctoral fellow at CITA in Toronto. She obtained her Masters at Lund Observatory in Sweden and her PhD in Heidelberg in Germany, where she worked on the evolution of the Milky Way disk. She wants to understand how galaxies form and evolve, and she is generally interested in all systems where we can resolve individual stars, and in the statistical methodologies that allow us to do justice to the immense data sets we are getting. Her main focus has been the Milky Way, and its most recent evolution. During the seminar, she will present her most recent work with collaborators on a structure called the Gaia Phase Spiral, or Gaia Snail, that has been teaching us much about how our Galaxy works.
Title: What sets the vertical structure of the Milky Way disk?
Abstract: The stellar body of disk galaxies show a wide variety in their structures: from warped disks to flares to differences between the gaseous and the stellar body. What processes determine the vertical structure of these disk with such a wide variety? For external galaxies, where much of the information comes in an integrated form, disentangling between processes at play can be challenging. With the ongoing explosion of data for our own galaxy from large scale spectroscopic and astrometric surveys, we have never seen the Milky Way in such great detail: we can now `see’ dynamics in action as our disk is shaping itself, thanks to the availability of 6D phase-space information for millions of stars. In particular, the recently discovered phase spiral in the vertical motion (the Gaia Snail) carries evidence for vertical phase mixing, departure from dynamical equilibrium, and may shed light on the processes setting the vertical structure of the Milky Way’s disk. I will introduce the Gaia Snail, the Iron Snail, and present different approaches that we can use to understand our Galaxy’s history.
Location Information
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON, CA N2L 3G1
