Colloquium on Apr. 16th, 2019

Galactic Archeology using large spectroscopic surveys in the Infrared: The APOGEE (SDSS-IIII/IV) survey and the MOONS project

Speaker: Mathias Schultheis

Venue: SWIFAR Building 2317

Time: 2:00 PM, Tuesday, 16th April, 2019

Abstract: 

How did our galaxy form? What is its place, and ours, in the cosmic evolution? Modern astronomy has revealed that the origins of our planet, our Sun and the Milky Way are intricately tied to the nature of the early Universe and the laws of physics.

Galactic Archaeology aims at unveiling the history of the Milky Way by analysing stars, just as the history of life was deduced from examining rocks. Stars record the past in their ages, compositions and kinematics and can provide unprecedented detailed constraints on the early phases of galaxy formation, back to redshifts greater than two (a look-back time of ~10 billion years). In particular, the chemical abundance patterns imprinted on stellar atmospheres reflect the gas conditions at the time of the stars' formation. The 'chemical tagging' approach  opens the way to the temporal sequencing of a large fraction of stars.

During the last years many galactic Archeology spectroscopic surveys has been performed (RAVE, APOGEE, Gaia-ESO, GALAH, LAMOST, etc..) with the aim to get detailed chemical abundances. I will give a overview of one of the surveys I am involved since the beginning -the APOGEE survey (SDSSIIII/IV). I will review here some of the results and will give at the end a short revuew of a new upcomung project on the VLT instrument I am heavily involved -the MOONS (ESO/VLT)  project