"From dawn till disk: Milky Way's turbulent youth revealed by the APOGEE+Gaia data”

 

Abstract: 

We use accurate estimates of aluminium abundance provided as part of the APOGEE Data Release 17 and Gaia Early Data Release 3 astrometry to select a highly pure sample of stars with metallicity $-1.5\lesssim {\rm [Fe/H]}\lesssim 0.5$ born in-situ in the Milky Way proper. We show that the low-metallicity ([Fe/H]$\lesssim -1.3$) in-situ component that we dub Aurora is kinematically hot with an...

"Tracing out the darkness with cold gas: dynamically probing galaxy evolution"

In this talk I will describe how mapping the dynamics of gas clouds in the centre of galaxies can help us to constrain a wide range of astrophysical problems. From the enigmatic relation between galaxies and their supermassive black holes, to the suppression of star-formation in dying galaxies, the dynamics of cold gas provides an ideal probe that can help us make progress. I will show how parsec resolution observations can be used to estimate the masses of supermassive black holes in galaxies...

The groundbreaking discoveries of gravitational waves from binary black-hole mergers and, more recently, coalescing neutron stars started a new era of Gravitational-Wave Astrophysics and revolutionized our understanding of the Cosmos. Deep learning algorithms, such as artificial neural networks, are already transforming many scientific and technological fields, and have also proven successful in gravitational-wave astrophysics for detection and parameter estimation of gravitational-wave signals from binary black holes. In...

Physical processes that redistribute or remove angular momentum from protoplanetary disks can drive mass accretion onto the star and affect the outcome of planet formation. Despite ubiquitous evidence for accretion, the process(es) responsible remain a mystery. I will describe how measurements of disk sizes and IR spectroscopy of nearly edge-on disks may shed new light on this long-standing problem, in the latter case by directly probing disk accretion in action! The results may provide evidence for...