Name: Science Utah: Discovering the Milky Way, a Modern Look at our Home Galaxy
Start: 2026-05-14T19:00:00-06:00
End: 2026-05-14T20:00:00-06:00
Location: Clark Planetarium

Science Utah: Discovering the Milky Way, a Modern Look at our Home Galaxy

What is the Milky Way’s hidden history? New surveys are revealing how our home galaxy formed and evolved.
About this Event

Discovering the Milky Way, a Modern Look at our Home Galaxy

Recent and upcoming surveys are offering an incredible new detailed view of our galactic home, the Milky Way galaxy. New missions are cataloging the star formation history, unveiling a rich history of accretion and dynamical interactions with neighbors, and enabling the creation of a more complete, richer picture of our home as we study it from the inside-out. In this talk, we will take a look at some of these new results and how they reveal our exciting Galactic history.

RACHEL LEE MCCLURE -- Rachel is new faculty up at Weber State University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. In addition to her teaching load, on campus she coordinates with the student workers of Ott Planetarium to serve both public and institutional astronomy outreach needs and manages the on campus research and public focused telescope fleet. Her research interests center on disk-galaxy evolution processes, using both large computational simulations and targeted galaxy observations. My thesis was an exploration of the formation and evolution of bars in disk galaxies throughout the universe where she provided new constraints on classical-pseudobulge evolution in the presence of a stellar bar and her on-going work aims to expand these constraints to conditions of disk galaxies from early in the history of the universe to connect galactic bar evolution across cosmological time.

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Please reserve only the number of tickets you will use.

About Science Utah:

The Science Utah Lecture Series is dedicated to bringing the latest scientific discoveries and discussions to the public, for free, by offering engaging lectures led by Utah-based scientists and researchers working in various fields.

To help support Clark Planetarium's efforts, please consider making a small donation at https://givebutter.com/ScienceUT. All donations aid Clark Planetarium and the free community events we offer year-round. Your contribution is invaluable in helping us inspire and educate people of all ages about the wonder of the universe.