Shaw-IAU Workshops by the OAE

The Milky Way, our home galaxy, serves as a natural laboratory for understanding galaxy formation and evolution. Its structural and dynamical components, such as the central bar and spiral arms, the thin and thick stellar disks, stellar halo, and dark matter halo, offer crucial insights into the processes that shape disk galaxies across cosmic time.

Observations reveal that the Galaxy formed hierarchically, through the merging and accretion of smaller systems and cold gas from the intergalactic medium. Faint stellar streams and satellite interactions preserve fossil records of these events, allowing reconstruction of the Milky Way’s evolutionary history. Modern surveys such as Gaia, JWST, and ground-based facilities like the Rubin Observatory (LSST) are revolutionizing our ability to map the Milky Way in unprecedented detail, bridging its local properties to the broader cosmological context of galaxy formation in the Universe.