Programm Potsdam-Berlin-Kolloquium, 11.10.2019
Daniel Zucker (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia)
The GALAH (GALactic Archaeology with HERMES) Survey is a major Australian-led project to obtain detailed elemental abundances for over a million stars, and apply the technique of chemical tagging -- identifying chemically similar groups of stars in the Galactic disk, which presumably formed together -- to decipher the star formation, migration and minor-merger history of the Milky Way. HERMES, scheduled for commissioning in late 2013, is a multi-fibre spectrograph being built for the AAT 3.9m telescope at Siding Spring, designed to simultaneously obtain high resolution (R ~28000 or ~45000) spectra for ~400 stars over a 2° field of view. For the GALAH Survey, ~106 stars (down to V~14, at a S/N of ~100 per resolution element) will be observed in four passbands selected to include elements from all major independently-varying element groups. Providing chemical abundances and precision radial velocities, GALAH will be directly complementary to the astrometry, parallaxes and proper motions which will come from ESA's Gaia mission.
