Colloquium by Andrew Casey, Monash
We’ve collected stellar spectra for more than 210 million stars in our galaxy. In this talk I will argue that there’s good reason for that: stellar spectra are uniquely informative tracers of cosmic evolution. The age and composition of stars trace the formation of the universe across many orders of magnitude in both space and time. In our local neighbourhood the most ancient stars can tell us about star formation at redshifts higher than what is possible with JWST, and the more common stars are explaining missing physics in stellar evolution, nucleosynthesis, and planet formation. The younger stars tell us about ongoing star formation and evolution in our own galaxy, where we are in a unique position to combine stellar observations with those of interstellar gas and dust, and resolve energy and momentum transport on critically important scales. I will describe our efforts in SDSS-V to collect necessary data to answer these problems, including some stunning new results from the Milky Way Mapper and the new Local Volume Mapper instrument.
Followed by wine and cheese.
Host: Kathryn Johnston