Galactic archaeology — fossil evidence of how our Galaxy's disk formed

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The vast stellar content of our Galaxy contains the fossil imprints of how it was formed. The current model for galaxy formation, the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm, is that they have built up over billions of years by the merging of smaller systems, but cosmological simulations fail to reproduce the key properties of individual galaxies. The predicted high level of merger activity makes it very difficult to form galaxies like our own. This is the key stumbling block to progress at the present time. The project aims to assess observationally how important mergers have been in the formation of the Galaxy, the critical test of CDM. The project will target the stars in the Galactic disk and bulge with the HERMES wide-field spectrograph.