Friday, March 8 at 7:30 pm

Galactic Archeology

Allyson Sheffield, Ph.D.

Professor of Physics,
LaGuardia Community College & American Museum of Natural History

How did the Milky Way get to look the way it looks today? Are there “cosmic fossils” that can be collected and studied, in the same way that the Earth’s history is probed with terrestrial fossils? The answer is yes, and one manifestation of these cosmic fossils are groups of stars called stellar streams. The identification of stellar streams associated with the Milky Way provide a way of looking at events that occurred billions of years ago, in some cases right after our galaxy formed. In this talk, Dr. Sheffield will discuss what stellar streams are, how they form, and how they can be found using large data sets..

The meeting is free and open to the public. We encourage live attendance so you can meet and greet fellow WAA members. If you can’t make it to Pace University, you can watch it on line. The Zoom link is on the Home page.