Jason Sanders (UCL) - Disentangling the history of our Galaxy in the era of Gaia

When: Friday, March 31, 2023, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
Where: Room 610 in G.O. Jones, and online.

Speaker: Jason Sanders (UCL)

Disentangling the history of our Galaxy in the era of Gaia

The study of the Milky Way has been revolutionised by the precision astrometry from Gaia accompanied with the detailed chemical view provided by large-scale spectroscopic surveys. With this data we are beginning to piece together the series of events that formed the Milky Way, from the collection of early mergers that now populate the stellar halo of the Galaxy to the recent perturbations to the Milky Way from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. In this timeline of key events we also have to place the time at which the bar formed. The bar is an important dynamical driver in the Galaxy but its fundamental properties such as rotation rate and formation time are still debated. I will discuss ongoing work on understanding the epoch of bar formation in the Milky Way focussing on the use of variable stars, the study of the related nuclear stellar disc structure in the Milky Way, and the complementary nature of Gaia and ground-based infrared astrometric surveys.