title: Forward Modelling the Secular Evolution of the Milky Way Disk
creator: Frankel, Neige
subject: ddc-500
subject: 500 Natural sciences and mathematics
subject: ddc-520
subject: 520 Astronomy and allied sciences
description: We know precisely the position of the Sun in our Galaxy. Yet, like for most stars,  we cannot tell where it was born. Stars undergo dynamical memory loss: their  orbits evolve, because the Milky Way, like many galaxies, has non-axisymmetric  structures (e.g. bar, spirals) that shuffle stellar orbits. My thesis quantifies the  strength of that process to answer: How (much) do stars change orbit? Can we still  infer their birth places, to constrain the formation of the Milky Way disk? I have  combined data from the large stellar surveys APOGEE and Gaia, and developed  a method to extract the information they contain on the Galactic disk evolution. I  forward-modelled the formation of the stellar disk, the stars’ elemental abundances  and their subsquent orbital diffusion, which then informs us about their birth radii  through ’weak chemical tagging’. I have found that stars can change orbits by large  amounts, and most of this evolution is cold (the orbits stay near- circular). Secular  evolution determines how the Milky Way disk is structued. If the Milky Way is  typical this explain what drives disk galaxies in general to their typical exponential  disk density profiles.
date: 2021
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29328/1/thesis.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00029328
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-293288
identifier:   Frankel, Neige  (2021) Forward Modelling the Secular Evolution of the Milky Way Disk.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29328/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng