Reconstructing the Milky Way disk’s chemical evolution with a data-driven metallicity profile

The relatively unchanging chemical abundances of stellar atmospheres contain 
important information regarding the environment in which the stars formed 
in, and make them an essential tool for untangling the Milky Way's 
enrichment history. The evolution of the interstellar medium abundance 
gradient with cosmic time, however, is obscured as a result of radial mixing 
processes; the radial abundance gradients with age flatten over time, and 
are not representative of the environment that the stars formed in. In this 
talk, I will discuss the method for recovering a disk’s ISM metallicity 
profile with time directly from a galaxy’s age—metallicity relation. 
Applying our recently proposed correction to account for the growth of the 
star-forming region in a disk improves the recovery of the [Fe/H] gradient 
by over 30%, thus providing more meaningful stellar birth radii estimates. 
Using these
estimates, I will illustrate the radial structure lost in different 
abundance planes, and how this can influence conclusions about chemical 
evolution in the Milky Way disk.

This seminar is organised by the Ursa Minor research group and is open to all.