This event was recorded on July 19, 2023 at Aspen Center for Physics during the 2023 DeWolf Foundation Physics Talks, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
Our Universe is made up of many billions of galaxies, yet we are still trying to figure out how they form, evolve, and assemble themselves. This question of galaxy formation and assembly is among the most fundamental in modern astronomy yet the answer still eludes us to this day. The Milky Way is an optimal laboratory for answering the questions of galaxy formation and assembly because it is one of the only systems to date where we can obtain detailed and precise data on the positions, motions, and chemical composition for billions of individual stars. Using our Galaxy as a sandbox for exploring galaxy formation and assembly is the essence of Galactic archaeology. In this talk, Dr. Keith Hawkins goes on a journey through our Galaxy and explains how we can use state-of-the-art data large scale missions to chart the Milky Way’s structure and assembly over the last 10 billion years.
Dr. Keith Hawkins is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.S. in astrophysics with minors in Mathematics and African Studies from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University as a Templeton and Goldwater Scholar in 2013. Dr. Hawkins completed several research internships around the world and taught middle school mathematics in the West African nation of Ghana during his undergraduate degree. After undergrad, Dr. Hawkins completed a 2.5 year Ph.D. in Astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge in the UK as a British Marshall Scholar. In 2016-2018 he was a Simons Junior Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University in New York City. In 2018, he joined the faculty at UT Austin and has just received a promotion with tenure. His research interests are in Galactic archaeology, with the goal of revealing the formation and evolution of our Galaxy through detailed chemical and dynamical studies of individual stars.