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Due to Gaia’s outstanding astrometric capabilities, the field of Galactic cartography is currently undergoing a revolution, reaching a level of detail and precision that has not been seen before. In this talk I will present some of the recent results in this field: imprints of major mergers in the Galaxy, chemical inhomogeneities in the Galactic disk, and disequilibrium features in stellar distribution and kinematics. Then, I will focus on the 3D mapping of the Galactic spiral arms. We analyzed a sample of young giant stars from Gaia DR3 and used their metallicity distribution to produce a 3D metallicity map. In this map we find that the vertical height of the spiral arms varies across the Galactic disc, exhibiting vertical asymmetries with respect to the mid-plane. Specifically, the Perseus arm displays a high vertical asymmetry consistent with the Galactic warp. Then, by extending the use of metallicity distribution as tracer of disk’s morphology, we find evidence of a large-scale metal-rich stellar structure that undulates vertically and has not been detected before. With this work we show that mapping the 3D metallicity distribution can reveal important clues about the structures, dynamics, and chemical enrichment in the Galactic disk.

BIO

Dr. Luis Martínez is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Astronomy of UNAM in Mexico City. He obtained his PhD in Physics from the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico. Following his doctoral studies, he held a postdoctoral position at UNAM, where he focused on the dynamics of the Milky Way’s disk. Then he moved to the United Kingdom where he was a Research Fellow at the University of Surrey, modelling star cluster evolution through N-body simulations.

Dr. Martínez’s research interests lie in galactic dynamics, which include: the impact of spiral arms on stellar disks, stellar migration and disk heating, the evolution of star clusters, and the use of Gaia data to study the morphology of the Milky Way's stellar disk.

Host: Hui Li