Abstract

Galactic archeology enables us to characterize the Milky Way’s assembly over cosmic time which has broad implications for the topic of galaxy formation as a whole. In this talk, we will take a journey throughout the Galactic frontier to navigate the structure and formation of the Milky Way. Using stars as tracers of the Galaxy, we use asteroseismology and spectroscopy to investigate the ages of stars and look into a peculiar “forbidden” population of stars known as Massive Alpha Enhanced stars. With a high-level understanding of the tools of the field, we search for the dominant chemical processes driving the disk of the Milky Way using chemical cartography. We confirm a metallicity gradient in the disk using APOGEE DR17 stars of d[Fe/H]/dR ~ -0.066 dex/kpc and find azimuthal variations from this gradient on the ~0.1 dex-level. For the first time, we quantify the age-dependence of the azimuthal variations as well as looking into other elements (e.g., Mg, O) and correlations with dynamics. We zoom further out in the Galaxy to the stellar halo and use stars from HETDEX to probe the hierarchical formation of the Milky Way. With these four projects, we are closer to answering the primary question driving Galactic archeology — how did the Milky Way form?