Event Details

Dr. Sarah Loebman, Hubble Fellow and Chancellor's Fellow, UC Davis will present a seminar "Understanding Our Home: Simulating the Evolving Milky Way."

We live inside a truly exciting astrophysical laboratory - the Milky Way galaxy - which provides a unique detailed perspective into the dynamics of stars and the physics of galaxy formation. Characterizing both the stellar and the dark matter content of the Milky Way and uncovering the Milky Way's formation history are key science goals of major ongoing and upcoming surveys such as APOGEE, Gaia, and LSST.  However, observations of the Milky Way span a complex multi-dimensional space which necessitates sophisticated modeling to interpret.  In this talk, I will highlight some of my recent achievements that utilize state-of-the-art simulations to provide deep insight into the Milky Way's content, formation, and evolution. In particular, I will discuss the Milky Way's disk and the role radial migration has played in redistributing stars within it. I will also discuss how a galaxy merger in the Milky Way's distant past impacted the movement of stars in our stellar halo today. I will conclude by discussing exciting new frontiers that Milky Way simulations are poised to tackle in the near future.