Colloquium - Aarya Patil’s “A Billion Stars, One Galaxy: Reconstructing the Milky Way’s History with Astrostatistics”

Event details Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2026 Time: 1:00 PM Location: Bryant Space Science Center Room 217 Type: Exhibits / Arts Tags: Seminar About this event Speaker: Aarya Patil Title: A Billion Stars, One Galaxy: Reconstructing the Milky Way's History with Astrostatistics Abstract: Billion-star surveys have transformed the Milky Way into a uniquely detailed laboratory for understanding how disk galaxies form and evolve. Each star carries information about the Galaxy's chemical, dynamical, and evolutionary history. However, reconstructing this history requires combining heterogeneous surveys that provide complementary but incomplete views of stellar populations. In this talk, I will present statistical and computational methods that connect stellar observations with models of galaxy evolution. I will address three questions: (1) How can we combine observations from multiple surveys to infer stellar properties? (2) How can these properties reveal the Milky Way's formation history? (3) What can our Galaxy teach us about galaxy evolution more broadly? I will first discuss methods for estimating stellar ages, chemical compositions, and orbits from spectroscopic, asteroseismic, and astrometric data. I will then show how these measurements can quantify the efficiency of secular processes in the Galactic disk, particularly those associated with the Galactic bar. Finally, I will discuss how Euclid and Rubin LSST will extend these investigations into the Galactic halo, combining deep observations with wide-area coverage to reconstruct the Milky Way's accretion history. 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM 217 Bryant Space Science Center Official event details: https://calendar.ufl.edu/clas_astronomy/event/58597-colloquium-aarya-patils-a-billion-stars-one-galaxy-rec