The GALAH Survey and Galactic Archaeology in the next decade

TL;DR

The GALAH Survey aims to unravel the Milky Way's history by collecting high-resolution spectra of one million stars, enabling detailed chemical and kinematic analysis to understand galaxy formation and evolution.

Contribution

This paper introduces the GALAH Survey, a large-scale project utilizing a novel spectrograph to gather comprehensive stellar data for Galactic Archaeology.

Findings

High-resolution spectra for one million stars collected.

Detailed chemical tagging of the Milky Way's stellar populations.

Complementary data with other Galactic surveys enhances understanding.

Abstract

The field of Galactic Archaeology aims to understand the origins and evolution of the stellar populations in the Milky Way, as a way to understand galaxy formation and evolution in general. The GALAH (Galactic Archaeology with HERMES) Survey is an ambitious Australian-led project to explore the Galactic history of star formation, chemical evolution, minor mergers and stellar migration. GALAH is using the HERMES spectrograph, a novel, highly multiplexed, four-channel high-resolution optical spectrograph, to collect high-quality R ~ 28,000 spectra for one million stars in the Milky Way. From these data we will determine stellar parameters, radial velocities and abundances for up to 29 elements per star, and carry out a thorough chemical tagging study of the nearby Galaxy. There are clear complementarities between GALAH and other ongoing and planned Galactic Archaeology surveys, and also with ancillary stellar data collected by of major cosmological surveys. Combined, these data sets will provide a revolutionary view of the structure and history of the Milky Way.