Abstract

The Gaia satellite is measuring up to 6-D phase-space coordinates for over 1 billion stars across the Milky Way, while a multitude of ground-based surveys are measuring multi-species elemental abundances for over 10 million stars, with the promise of using stellar 'chemical tagging' to reconstruct the 6-D formation history of the Milky Way across cosmic time. Motivated by this exciting new era of galactic archeology, I will describe our Latte suite of cosmological zoom-in simulations that model the formation of Milky Way-like galaxies at parsec-scale resolution, using the FIRE (Feedback in Realistic Environments) model for star formation and feedback. I will discuss how we are using these simulations for several applications to understanding galactic archeology of the Milky Way: the formation of its thin+thick stellar disk morphology; the origin of its most ancient and metal-poor stars; the dynamics and lifetimes of giant molecular clouds and their stars; and guiding approaches to stellar 'chemical tagging'. I also will discuss the publicly available synthetic Milky Way-like surveys that we are creating from these simulations.