About this Event
Speaker: Gerry Gilmore, University of Cambridge
Abstract: What we call the Milky Way, our Galaxy, has been the focus of myth, story and study in every society with a recorded history for millennia. Understanding its structure defeated Isaac Newton. One hundred years ago it was realized that the Milky Way is just one amongst a Universe of galaxies. With the Gaia spacecraft and other surveys we see two billion stars moving, measuring their distances, speeds, ages and chemical composition. We can observe the structure and assembly history of the Milky Way Galaxy over its 13 billion year history, even identifying surviving stars from the earliest proto-structures to form soon after the Big Bang. We quantify the formation of the chemical elements over time and their distribution in space. We use stellar dynamics to weigh the unseen Dark Matter. We can calculate the future of the Milky Way until it ends its existence as an isolated Galaxy, merging with Andromeda some 5 billion years from now, with the death of the Sun a few billion years after that. This lecture will tell that story.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
610 S Michigan Ave, 610 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
