Giovedì 26 marzo alle ore 12:00 Elena Valenti (European Southern Observatory, Garching – Germania) terrà un seminario dal titolo “From Questions to Answer: The Milky Way bulge with MOONS”. 

ABSTRACT:
The formation of bulges remains one of the key open questions in galaxy evolution. Several mechanisms have been proposed – such as the dynamical instability of a stellar disk, the inward migration and coalescence of massive clumps in gas-rich high-redshift disks, mergers of various scale, and dissipative collapse – but their relative contributions are still uncertain. In this context, the Milky Way bulge offers a uniquely powerful laboratory. Only in our own Galaxy individual bulge stars, down to the old main sequence turnoff, can be resolved and their detailed properties measured. This enables us to derive the bulge’s global characteristics (i.e., its kinematics, chemical enrichment, and age distribution) directly from the stellar populations themselves. In this talk, I will present an overview of the current understanding of the Milky Way bulge, drawing on extensive photometric and spectroscopic surveys carried out over the past decade. I will summarize the key results, highlight the major open questions that remain, and discuss how MOONS – the forthcoming multi-fiber spectrograph at VLT – will be uniquely positioned to address them.