Virtual lecture: Babelsberg Starry Night on 19 September 2024

On Thursday at 7pm, the lecture by Dr. Cristina Chiappini on "Our Galaxy has a history" from the Babelsberg Starry Nights series will be online.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of the most beautiful structures in the sky. We live inside this galaxy, yet it still hasn’t been fully mapped. Thanks to ESA's Gaia satellite, which is on a mission to record data for almost two billions of stars, our understanding of the Milky Way is gradually becoming more complete. In her talk, Cristina Chiappini gives an overview of how astronomers are using Gaia data to show that our galaxy tells a unique story - and how we are in the process of unravelling its past. On this journey, not only the positions and velocities of the stars, but also their chemical composition, serve as ‘fossil records’ clues to the history of the Milky Way.

Only our own galaxy can be studied in such detail, as it is the only one where we have rich information on a large number of individual stars. Nevertheless, parts of the Milky Way’s history also shed light on the formation and evolution of other galaxies and contribute to our understanding of the chemical enrichment of the universe as a whole.

Usually on the 3rd Thursday of each month, starting at 7 or 8 p.m., the lectures of the Virtual Babelsberg Starry Nights become available at

https://www.aip.de/babelsberger-sternennaechte

and via the YouTube channels "Urknall, Weltall und das Leben" (Big Bang, Universe and Life) or "videowissen" and can be viewed afterwards at any time.