New insights into galaxy formation and evolution

埋藏在我们银河系后院的是一个关于银河系如何形成和演化的信息宝库。“银河考古学”的领域开始揭示和破译这些信息对我们的星系和星系形成的影响。在接下来的十年里，银河考古学将经历一场革命，因为欧洲航天局的盖亚任务将提供对超过10亿颗恒星的恒星位置和数千万颗恒星的真实运动的精确的新观测。结合即将到来的对恒星化学特征的调查（具有相似化学特征的恒星可能是一起形成的），我们将能够拼凑出它们在过去的进化过程。我的研究计划的第一部分概述了在并行计算机上进行的一系列模拟，这些模拟将为我们的银河考古学研究引入新的保真度，并使我们能够以极高的精度模拟来自盖亚（和其他）调查的即将到来的数据。我将一步一步地增加物理复杂性，以便最终包括银河系中存在的所有主要物理过程。

Buried within our galactic backyard is a treasure trove of information about how our galaxy, the Milky Way, formed and evolved. The field of "galactic archaeology" sets out to uncover and decipher the implications of this information both for our galaxy and galaxy formation in general. In the next decade, galactic archaeology is about to undergo a revolution as the European Space Agency's Gaia mission will provide exquisite new observations of the stellar positions of over a billion stars and true motions of tens of millions. Combined with upcoming surveys of the chemical signatures of stars (stars with similar chemical signatures were likely formed together) we will then be able to piece together their evolution back in time. The first part of my research program outlines a series of simulations on parallel computers that will introduce new levels of fidelity into our studies of galactic archaeology, and enable us to model upcoming data from the Gaia survey (and others) with great precision. Step-by-step I will increase physical complexity so as to eventually include all the dominant physical processes present in the Milky Way.