James Binney

Date

18 March 2026

Host 

Saha Prasenjit

Title

Making sense of galaxies

Abstract

Data of astonishing quality about both our Galaxy and external galaxies continues to accumulate fast. The need to extract from these data a picture of how galaxies are structured is urgent. We must simplify: to each galaxy we should associate an underlying equilibrium model around which the object fluctuates. The minimal equilibrium model is a distribution of stars in five-dimensional chemo-dynamic space. I'll discuss strategies for constructing such models and review applications to data. A similar approach should be applied to the N-body models of galaxies that emerge from cosmological simulations

Recording