Speaker
Description
Since its discovery in 2018, the Gaia Phase Spiral has stimulated intense research in the field of galactic dynamics. It is widely accepted that the phase spiral is a perturbation to the disk caught in the act of phase mixing away. Less clear are the inferences made from the observed morphology of the spiral. For example, can we determine the age of spiral from the spiral's structure? Are we observing a singular feature or the superposition of multiple phase spirals with multiple origins? And at a more fundamental level, what can the spiral teach us about the structure of the stellar disk, the Milky Way's system of satellite galaxies, and its dark halo? I will review recent theoretical and numerical work that addresses these and other questions.
