Ting Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and an Associated Faculty Member of the Dunlap Institute, at the University of Toronto. Before joining the University of Toronto in 2021, she was the 2019 NASA Hubble Fellow at Carnegie Observatories, with a joint appointment in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University as a Carnegie-Princeton Fellow. She was a Leon Lederman Fellow at the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics during 2016-2019. Ting grew up in Shanghai, China, where she completed her bachelor's degree at Fudan University, with a major in physics and a minor in diplomacy. She received the Eramus Mundus Scholarship for a Joint European Master Program in Space Science and Technology. She earned her PhD in physics from Texas A&M University in 2016.
Title: Milky Way's Stellar Streams as Cosmological Probes
Abstract: Stellar streams are one of the most powerful tracers to determine the mass and profile of the Milky Way as well as constrain the properties of dark matter. In this talk, I will discuss two ongoing spectroscopic programs to study the stellar streams in our Milky Way and highlight a few latest scientific results from these two programs. The Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5), started in 2018, is the first systematic program pursuing a complete census of known streams in the Southern Hemisphere using the fiber-fed AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The Milky Way Survey of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), on the other hand, is a recently started 5-yr spectroscopic program in the Northern Hemisphere. We are entering an extremely data-rich era in the next decade, with full 6D+chemistry information on dozens of stellar streams, to shape our understanding on the chemo-dynamical evolution of the Milky Way, as well as the nature of the dark matter.