Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Understanding physical processes responsible for the formation and evolution of galaxies like the Milky Way is a fundamental problem. However, a key challenge is that the properties and orbits of the stars can only be observed at present: to understand what happened in the Milky Way at earlier epochs, one must explore “archaeological” techniques. I will discuss the opportunities associated with Galactic archaeology with the on-going large scale multiplexing spectroscopic surveys, including a first quantitative constraint on the radial migration of stars and on the disrupted cluster mass function in the Milky Way. I will also describe a new set of tools for efficient measuring > 20 elemental abundances from low-resolution R=2000 spectra, for discovering spectroscopically unresolved binaries, and for inferring asteroseismic parameters directly from single-epoch spectra.