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The assembly history of the Milky Way has been revealed in fantastic detail in recent years thanks to dedicated spectroscopic and astrometric surveys of millions of its stars. At the same time, IFU observations of external galaxies at intermediate redshifts are producing statistical snapshots of the diverse kinematic and chemical structures intrinsic to populations of galaxies. Our group’s ongoing collaborative work at ANU aims to connect the Milky Way to higher redshift observations, by developing tools that quantify how different accretion and star formation histories imprint themselves on present day galaxy disk properties. After testing these models on the velocity dispersion and scale height data of the Milky Way’s disks, I will show a first application to MUSE observations of a galaxy in the Fornax cluster, which have revealed signatures of an ancient (z=2) merger event in that galaxy. This offers an example of how semi-analytic models applied to chemo-dynamical observations of external galaxies can provide a ’MilkyWay-like’ view of their assembly history. This will not only help us quantify the impact of mergers on disk structure and test cosmological predictions for merger rates, but also understand if the recovered merger history of the Milky Way is (a)typical for galaxies of its mass. |
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