Title: Building Galaxies in our Backyard
Abstract: Most astronomers believe that large galaxies like the Milky
Way and M31 (Andromeda) form by the merger and accretion of smaller
systems, and that evidence of these processes can be found in the
stellar streams and the surviving satellites surrounding each galaxy.
The advent of large-area astronomical surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey (SDSS) has revolutionised our ability to find and study
incredibly faint Local Group stellar structures, yielding a wealth of
information about the process of galaxy assembly and giving tantalising
hints about the properties of dark matter. These capabilities are
expanding, with numerous projects now underway or starting in the next
few years. I will give an overview of the flood of recent stream and
satellite discoveries in the Local Group made with data from SDSS and
other surveys, and present the results of detailed follow-up
observations with both ground- and space-based telescopes.
Biography: Daniel Zucker is an observational astronomer who studies
resolved stellar populations and nebulae in the Milky Way and the other
galaxies of the Local Group, in order to understand the processes by
which galaxies form and evolve — both nearby and in the universe as a
whole. He holds a joint appointment as a Lecturer in Astronomy and
Astrophysics at Macquarie University and a Staff Astronomer at the
Australian Astronomical Observatory. Daniel received his undergraduate
degree from Harvard College, and went on to work at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, prior to obtaining his PhD
from the University of Washington in Seattle. Before stepping into his
current position, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck
Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Institute of
Astronomy, Cambridge, UK.
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