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The History of the Milky Way
May 5, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm EDT
Free
Understanding the Milky Way's history answers the question, "How did we get here?" Stars in the Milky Way are the fossil records of the Milky Way's history. Ongoing efforts of observations revealed chemical abundances and kinematics of the Milky Way's stars. However, we still need to find out the complete history of the Milky Way. In this talk, I will show how astronomers try to understand the Milky Way's formation. Numerical simulations are powerful tools for understanding the history of the Milky Way. Thanks to the advancements in supercomputers, we can compute the formation of Milky Way-like galaxies. Astronomers nowadays try to extract information about the Milky Way's formation over 10 billion years ago by comparing simulations and observations. I will describe how to simulate the Milky Way's formation and the current understanding of the history of the Milky Way.
About the Speaker:
Yutaka Hirai is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Notre Dame, where he works on the formation of the Milky Way and dwarf galaxies using high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations. He got his bachelor's degree in physics at Waseda University in Japan. Yutaka then moved to the University of Tokyo as a graduate student. He received his master's degree in 2015 and his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 2018 there. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at RIKEN and Tohoku University before joining the University of Notre Dame on December 2021. He has numerous experiences talking about galaxy formation and the origin of elements and taught physics at Konan University. He has been awarded Springer Theses, RIKEN special postdoctoral researcher, and JSPS Research fellowship.
NOTE: This meeting will be streamed from the Kalamazoo Area Math & Science Center Visit kasonline.org to learn more.
