Speaker
Description
Thanks to the accurate astrometry and kinematics provided by the Gaia mission the complex formation process of the Milky Way is now being understood. The halo of the Milky Way has suffered from the continued merging process with dwarf and primitive satellites. Luckily, a substructure originating in a single accretion event can be identified as a tight cluster of stars in phase space sharing chemical properties.
The Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus event, the subsequent Splash, and the residuals of several old systems are living in the solar neighborhood and could be chemically characterized by high-resolution spectrographs mounted in 2-4m class telescopes. We are entering the era of the nearest field cosmology where the relics of ancient systems are around and accessible for facilities such as the Nordic Optical Telescope.
