The Chemical Record: Elements of Galactic Memories
From the first stars to the present day, chemical elements have acted as a written record of the evolution of our Universe, inscribed in the stars. Each nucleosynthetic event, from explosive supernovae to gentle stellar winds, leaves behind the memory of the star and environment from which it came, passed down as chemical elements mix into galaxies and seed new generations of stars. In this talk, I will explore how we can uncover these memories: how the first stars dispersed the first heavy elements throughout the cosmos, how dwarf galaxies have preserved the memories of ancient mixing in elemental abundance scatter, and how just a few bold chemical threads woven through our own Galaxy point to a past that can still be discovered with the right data. To decipher the chemical record, I will weave together observations and cosmological simulations to cross spatial scales and cosmic time. In doing so, we will see how the stars remember and retell elements of galactic memories.
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