Gayandhi da Silva
ESO

"Chemical Homogeneity in Galactic Star Clusters"

One of the major goals of near-field cosmology is to determine the sequence of events involved in the formation of the Galactic disk. Since the disk formed dissipatively and evolved dynamically, most of the dynamical information is lost. However chemical information survives. If star-forming aggregates have unique chemical signatures, we can use the method of chemical tagging to tag dispersed stars to back to their common formation sites. The critical issue for the viability of this method is whether the star-forming aggregates do indeed have unique chemical signatures. The essential first step is to investigate chemical homogeneity of disk clusters which are the likely leftovers of the star-forming aggregates in the disk.