Constraining the Milky Way assembly history with Galactic Archaeology

By I. Minchev. 2016

19 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim of Galactic Archaeology is to recover the evolutionary history of the Milky Way from its present day kinematical and chemical state. Because stars move away from their birth sites, the current dynamical information alone is not sufficient for this task. The chemical composition of stellar atmospheres, on the other hand, is largely preserved over the stellar lifetime and, together with accurate ages, can be used to recover the birthplaces of stars currently found at the same Galactic radius. In addition to the availability of large stellar samples with accurate 6D kinematics and chemical abundance measurements, this requires detailed modeling with both dynamical and chemical evolution taken into account. An important first step is to understand the variety of dynamical processes that can take place in the Milky Way, including the perturbative effects of both internal (bar and spiral structure) and external (infalling satellites) agents. We discuss here (1) how to constrain the Galactic bar, spiral structure, and merging satellites by their effect on the local and global disc phase-space, (2) the effect of multiple patterns on the disc dynamics, and (3) the importance of radial migration and merger perturbations for the formation of the Galactic thick disc. Finally, we discuss the construction of Milky Way chemo-dynamical models and relate to observations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

Yule-Simpson’s paradox in Galactic Archaeology (2019, methodology): “Galactic Archaeologists use the observed stellar kinematics, chemical abundances, and derived ages as fossil records to recover the chemo-dynamical history of the Milky Way (Freeman & Bland-Hawthorn 2002; Bland-Hawthorn et al. 2010; Rix & Bovy 2013; Binney 2013; Minchev 2016; Hogg et al. 2016).”
A Gaia DR2 view of the open cluster population in the Milky Way (2018, background): “…et al. 2016; Reddy et al. 2016) help us understand the internal processes of heating (Martinez-Medina et al. 2016; Gustafsson et al. 2016; Quillen et al. 2018) and radial migration (Roškar et al. 2008; Minchev 2016; Anders et al. 2017), and how they affect the chemodynamical evolution of the disk.”