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Mapping the Milky Way

NOVEMBER 7 & 8ÌýatÌý7PM

For centuries, humans have used the stars as guides to navigate the globe and construct maps of the Earth. These maps help us understand our planet, its history, and its patterns. By observing the night sky, we can extend our map to the stars, charting their location and movement in two dimensions on the celestial sphere. But how do we map the stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in three dimensions when we can't travel beyond our own solar system? What might we learn about our galaxy, its origin, and its evolution from these three-dimensional maps?
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Join us for this live talk where we will explore our Milky Way galaxy in 3D with data collected from missions like and the . We'll learn how astronomers map the Milky Way from the Earth and discover patterns in the stars' chemical properties that teach us about our Galaxy's history. Along the way we'll uncover how different types of stellar explosions produce the elements on the periodic table and create chemical patterns across space.
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Dr. Emily Griffith is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy at CU Â鶹ӰԺ. By studying spectra of the stars, she researches the origin of the elements and the properties of the astronomical events that create them. She is a member of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a collaboration that is taking spectra of millions of stars in the Milky Way.