Colloq Abstract - Alves
February 15, 2019
11:00am Mountain
Joao Alves (Harvard/Vienna)
The rise of the Milky Way
Abstract
Most of what we know about star and planet formation has been obtained from spatial 2D observations of the local Galactic neighborhood (d ~ 1 kpc), collected over the last 70 years. During this time we have built a pragmatic, although simplified, view of the local complexes, establishing a series of ground truths that guide today's star formation research. For example: we use Orion as the template for massive star formation and Taurus for low-mass star formation; We embraced supersonic turbulence as a fundamental pillar of the star formation process, but have not identified its source; We have organized groups of young stars as either bound clusters or associations and wondered about the origin of an all-sky structure we call Gould’s belt. In this talk, I will report on our ongoing exploration of the Gaia data in the local neighborhood. We have so far seen evidence for a new arrangement of the dense gas that alone forever changes the assumed basic architecture of the local gas. We have found tidal tails of nearby clusters and what is likely to be the long, stretched remnants of old clusters and associations in the Sun’s close vicinity. Although still mostly unexplored, the Gaia data is starting to change, sometimes in dramatic ways, our view of the Local Neighborhood, and with it, our understanding star formation and the structure of the Galactic disk.
