Star Wars Episode 0: The Rise of the Milky Way by Dr Sven Buder, 6:30pm Monday 4th May

Adapted from fanthatracks and fontmeme by Dirk Goës

A long time ago in a galaxy not at all far away…

everything was in turmoil. Over billions of years, our Milky Way was constantly bombarded with gas, stars, and even entire galaxies. These cosmic collisions helped shape the spiral galaxy we see today, whose billions of stars appear as the faint Milky Way band stretching across our night sky.

The stars that formed during these events still carry the memory of that turbulent past. By analysing their light with stellar spectroscopy, we can measure the chemical fingerprints of stars and uncover where they formed and how our Galaxy assembled over billions of years.

Combining these observations with cosmological simulations allows us to test different formation histories of the Milky Way and other disc galaxies, helping us understand which ancient galactic encounters shaped the Galaxy we live in today.

Join Dr Sven Buder in a journey to uncover the forces that shaped our Galaxy and the traces they left in the light of its stars.

Dr Sven Buder

Dr Sven Buder is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the Australian National University. He combines high-resolution stellar spectroscopy and cosmological simulations to reconstruct the formation history of the Milky Way and to trace the origin of the chemical elements. He is principal investigator of the million-star Galactic Archaeology with HERMES Survey (GALAH) and its successor GALAH 2, and develops scalable, data-driven pipelines that translate spectra into precise and interpretable measurements for astronomy and interdisciplinary applications.

You can view Sven’s personal website here. 

This is an in-person event at Sydney Observatory, starting at 6:30pm.

Address: 1003 Upper Fort Street, Millers Point, The Rocks.

Details: This presentation will be in person at Sydney Observatory and also by Zoom. Members are encouraged to attend on-site. All members will also be emailed the Zoom link. If you are not a member and want to attend this talk please email our secretary on: sydneycityskywatchers@gmail.com.

Please arrive at Sydney Observatory by 6:20pm or log-in by 6:25pm. Notices and a short presentation by members are delivered before or after the keynote depending on circumstances.