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Understanding physical processes responsible for the formation and evolution of galaxies like the Milky Way is a fundamental problem in astrophysics. However, a key challenge is that the properties and orbits of the stars can only be observed at present: to understand what happened in the Milky Way at earlier epochs, one must explore "archaeological" techniques. One idea, "chemical tagging", aims to probe the history of the Milky Way via the unique imprint in chemical abundance space of long-disrupted star forming associations. I will discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with chemical tagging, including a first constraint on the disrupted cluster mass function in the Milky Way, and how extragalactic IFU studies could be informative in the studies of chemical tagging. I will also describe a new set of tools for efficient measuring multi-elemental abundances from large quantities of low-resolution stellar spectra, deriving the binary fraction of the Milky Way, and inferring asteroseismic parameters from spectra alone. |
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