Astronomy Colloquium: Jennifer Johnson
Date: Thu. November 12th, 2015, 3:00 pm-4:00 pmThe Secret Lives of Stars: Galactic History from the APOGEE Survey
Jennifer Johnson (Ohio State University)
The history of a galaxy can be traced through its stars: their compositions, their ages, and their motions. The Milky Way provides an ideal case for performing detailed Galactic archaeology to investigate the evolution of spiral galaxies. The SDSS-APOGEE spectroscopic survey, using a high-resolution, multi-object NIR spectrograph, has observed ~150,000 stars in the Galaxy, with particular emphasis on red giants in the Kepler field and in the dust-obscured regions of the disk and bulge. I will discuss how we are using spectroscopic and asteroseismic results to understand metallicity gradients, the prevalence of radial mixing of stars in the disk, and the origin of chemically peculiar populations in our Galaxy.