ABSTRACT

Understanding physical processes responsible for the formation and evolution of galaxies like the Milky Way is a fundamental problem in astrophysics. However, a key challenge is that the properties and orbits of the stars can only be observed at present: to understand what happened in the Milky Way at earlier epochs, one must explore “archaeological” techniques. One idea, "chemical tagging,” aims to probe the history of the Milky Way via the unique imprint in chemical abundance space of long-disrupted star forming associations. I will discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with chemical tagging, including a first constraint on the disrupted cluster mass function in the Milky Way, and how Gaia, as well as extragalactic IFU studies, could be informative in the studies of chemical tagging. I will also describe a new set of tools for efficient measuring multi-elemental abundances from large quantities of low-resolution LAMOST spectra, for constraining the binary fraction in the Milky Way, and for inferring asteroseismic parameters from spectra alone.

BIO

Yuan-Sen Ting is a Carnegie-Princeton Fellow and IAS Fellow at Princeton University, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Carnegie Observatories. He obtained his PhD in astronomy and astrophysics in 2017 from Harvard University funded through a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship. Before that, he completed a concurrent double degrees and masters program from the National University of Singapore and Ecole Polytechnique in France in 2012. He was awarded the Price Prize in 2016 in recognition of his work which operates at the cross-section between theoretical modeling, observational astronomy, machine learning and data science.