Remodeling the Milky Way

Thanks to high precision stellar distances and velocities obtained with the European Space Agency mission Gaia, astronomers are doing all sorts of Milky Way investigations that I personally never imagined would be possible. From identifying the ingredients that first formed the Milky Way, to unscrambling the young clusters around the Sun back to their point(s) of origin 40 million years ago to building highly accurate three-dimensional maps of the interstellar medium, we are in a Golden Age for Galactic astronomers. I will share some of these advances, how they are unravelling our old picture of the Milky Way, and pointing the path to something better.

If you’re interested in some background before the talk, check out the recent article about Bob’s resear...

Galactic Structures: Where do they come from? Where do they go?

Our observations of galaxies, from nearby to the edges of the observable universe, reveal striking diversity of size, environment, composition, and apparent structure. Ranging from the clumpy irregulars, through the massive round ellipticals, to the coherent disks — probing the mechanisms responsible for these formations in nature requires a wide range of investigative tools from theoretical observations to detailed spectroscopic observations. Barred spirals comprise 50% of the observed population of nearby disk galaxies yet the physical mechanisms that create and sustain these features are not well understood despite persistent study for nearly 200 years...