The Milky Way in context: Building an IFS datacube of the Galaxy

Abstract

Our Galaxy is by far the best studied in the Universe, and it has long been regarded as a benchmark for understanding galaxy evolution. However, the Milky Way is only one galaxy, and it is crucial to link Galactic and extra-galactic research to understand the formation and evolution of disk galaxies. Currently, it is difficult to compare galactic and extra-galactic observations directly: Galactic studies focus on individual stars, while extra-galactic are derived from integrated light. We present a novel approach to generate an integral field spectrograph (IFS) data cube of the Milky Way using theoretical models and catalogues of Galactic populations. This enables a direct comparison of the Galaxy with external systems to identify key signatures of formation processes, such as the detailed chemodynamic structure of disks, the velocity dispersion profile, the radial and vertical age gradients, and the mass fraction of the [ α /Fe]-rich versus [ α /Fe]-poor populations.