Speaker: Oscar Agertz (Lund University)
The VINTERGATAN project: towards understanding the origins of the Milky Way
In this talk I discuss the ongoing effort in modelling the formation of extended spiral galaxies like the Milky Way. I will present results from the VINTERGATAN project on the emerging chemo-dynamical structure of simulated galaxies, and discuss formation pathways for the Milky Way's thin and thick discs. The roles played by cosmological gas accretion and the last major merger will be highlighted. Finally, I will show preliminary result from a new suite of cosmological simulations where we have `genetically modified' galactic formation histories. This technology allows us to control merger histories in a fully cosmological setting, which we employed to a set of Milky Way-mass galaxies to gain new insights into the mechanisms that determine current day galaxy properties.
