Astronomy Tea Talk

Speaker: Vedant Chandra

Title: Tales from the Milky Way's Distant Horizon

Abstract: The outer halo of the Milky Way contains a fossil record of its assembly history, and traces the global gravitational field of our galaxy. I will summarize results from our all-sky spectroscopic survey of the most distant stars in the Galactic outskirts. We unveil enormous stellar structures imprinted by the MW's last major merger, and discover the long-sought stellar counterpart to the Magellanic Stream. We derive the most comprehensive measurements of the MW's global dynamical response to the infalling Large Magellanic Cloud, providing an independent constraint on the dark matter distribution in both galaxies. I conclude by describing the Via Project - a new multiplexed spectrograph for Magellan and the MMT - and outline what Via will teach us, from galaxy formation to the true nature of dark matter.

For more information, please contact Mandy Chen or Kaitlyn Shin by email at [email protected], [email protected].