Galactic Archaeology and The (Nearly) Dark Side of Galaxy Formation /  
Prof Andrew Cooper (NTHU)

In recent years, the study of galaxy evolution has been increasingly
driven by the statistical power of large 'low resolution' surveys at
modest redshift, notably SDSS.  However, forensic observations of a
relative handful of nearby galaxies, including our own Milky Way,
continue to make unique contributions.  Faint structures preserved in
stellar phase-space and the chemistry of long-lived stars offer the
hope of reconstructing events in those galaxies that happened up to 10
billion years ago, including mergers between the hierarchical
progenitors of present-day systems. This approach to galaxy formation
through the faint, nearby universe, often called 'galactic
archaeology', is an important route to constraining the complex
relationship between galaxies and their dark matter halos. I'll
introduce my work on galactic archaeology with cosmological
simulations, which provide a theoretical context for predicting and
interpreting galactic archaeology data, rooted in the big picture of
the Lambda-CDM cosmology. I'll also talk about our preparations for
the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Milky Way Survey (DESI-MWS),
one of the largest Galactic archaeology projects of the next decade.