The guest of hounor for the January 19th meeting is James Lane, who will be presenting by Zoom.
Join us on Zoom. Log on as early as 7:00pm and meeting starts at 7:30pm.
Zoom link is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89015777788
Bio:
James is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto where he studies our Milky Way galaxy using data from the Gaia Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. James is originally from Victoria, BC, where he also got his physics degree from the University of Victoria. In his spare time James enjoys cycling, hiking, and reading about history.
Abstract:
The Milky Way galaxy, our home, is one of billions of galaxies scattered throughout the Universe. A fundamental quest in astrophysics is to determine how these galaxies, and our Milky Way in particular, have formed and evolved over cosmic time. The Gaia Space Telescope measures the motions of individual stars in the Milky Way, data which is crucial for establishing its past and present nature. One of the most surprising discoveries of this new era of data is that the Milky Way collided with another galaxy nearly 10 billion years ago. In this talk I will explain how astronomers work like archaeologists, using remnants of the event that we can detect today with data from the Gaia Space Telescope, to piece together the circumstances of this collision between two young galaxies which established our Milky Way.