Lecture: The formation of the Milky Way

Image shows a slice through the Eagle simulation – that Dr Tom Theun will talk about – with the gas coloured in according to temperature, blue=cold, green=warm, red=hot, and insets zooming in on the galaxies that formed in this much larger structure. c/o ICC Durham University.

The origins of the Milky Way will come under the microscope at Sunderland Astronomical Society’s January lecture meeting.

Dr Tom Theuns, an astronomer from Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, is the guest speaker, discussing the Milky Way’s formation.

The Milky Way contains about 100 billion stars, one of which is our Sun. The Sun is 4.5 billion years old, but other stars in the Milky Way are much older, others are much younger.

How did the young Milky Way look like?
Did it always have a disk of stars?
And what will it look like 4.5 billion years from now?

In this talk Tom will explain how we are beginning to understand how galaxies form and evolve. Supercomputer simulations follow the formation of structure in the universe, as well as how galaxies form inside dark matter halos. Such simulations manage to form the whole “Hubble Sequence” of observed galaxies, from spirals to ellipticals.

But in contrast to observations we can also see galaxies evolve. In particular, we can examine what it takes for a galaxy to become like the Milky Way.

All are welcome at the meeting, at  7.00 pm.

There will be a small charge for non-members.