TY  - GEN
ID  - heidok29328
UR  - https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29328/
CY  - Heidelberg
A1  - Frankel, Neige
Y1  - 2021///
AV  - public
TI  - Forward Modelling the Secular Evolution of the Milky Way Disk
N2  - 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.
ER  -