Diane Feuillet (Uppsala University): Find foreign stars in the Milky Way and discovering the history of their original homes

Thursday 14 Nov 2024, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Stockholm

Title: Find foreign stars in the Milky Way and discovering the history of their original homes
Speaker: Diane Feuillet
Affiliation: Uppsala University
Time: Thursday 14th November 2024, 14:00 to 15:00
Location:  2004 Å

Abstract:  Since the explosion of data from the Gaia satellite, we are now able to confirm the presence of large stellar populations in the Milky Way that came from ancient dwarf galaxies accreted onto the Milky Way in the past ~10 Gyr. This now confirms the predictions of ΛCDM cosmology that galaxies commonly grow in size by colliding with and accreting smaller galaxies. As one of the largest galaxies in the Local Group, the Milky Way has likely had a very turbulent history, which we can uncover by identifying and characterizing accreted stars. The nearby dwarf galaxies that we observe today serve as analogues of the now-destroyed low-mass building blocks of our Galaxy. I will discuss some of the ways we can identify these accreted stellar populations in the Milky Way, what we can learn about their galaxies of origin, and how they compare to present-day nearby dwarf galaxies.