Andrew Wetzel is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Davis. His research
Talk Title and Abstract
The Formation of the Milky Way
The Gaia space telescope is measuring up to 6-D phase-space coordinates for billions of stars across the Milky Way, while a multitude of ground-based spectroscopic surveys measure elemental abundances for millions of stars, all with the promise of using stellar 'chemical tagging' to reconstruct the formation history of the Milky Way across cosmic time. Motivated by this new era of galactic archeology, I will describe our suite of cosmological zoom-in simulations that model the formation of Milky Way-like galaxies at parsec-scale resolution, using the FIRE (Feedback in Realistic Environments) model. I will discuss how we use these simulations to understand galactic archeology of the Milky Way: the formation of its thin+thick stellar disk morphology; the origin of its most ancient and metal-poor stars; the dynamics and lifetimes of giant molecular clouds and their star clusters; and approaches to stellar 'chemical tagging’ in a cosmological context.
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