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HYBRID – General Meeting – March 2026
March 6 @ 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Title: A Cosmic Odyssey: The Epic Journey of our Milky Way Galaxy
Astronomers estimate that approximately one in a thousand galaxies in the nearby universe is in the act of colliding. Although rare locally, we find that galaxy mergers were far more common and produced the majority of all the infrared emission in the early Universe. Therefore, studying these rare mergers in our local Universe gives us a window into the galactic train wrecks of the early Universe that shaped galaxy evolution. It has been over 100 years since astronomer Vesto Slipher discovered that, unlike every other galaxy we observe, our nearest neighbor, Andromeda, is on a collision course with the Milky Way. In order to understand the fate of our galaxy, observations of hundreds of ongoing galaxy mergers, with have been collected, with every major space-based observatory available—e.g. Hubble, Spitzer, Herschel, GALEX, Chandra, and JWST— as part of the Great Observatories All-Sky LIRG Survey (GOALS). These luminous infrared galaxies host the most extreme dust-enshrouded stellar nurseries in the local Universe. In this talk, Dr. Sean Linden presents the story of the Milky Way Galaxy; how the ongoing interaction with Andromeda has shaped it so far, and what we have learned about galaxy mergers in GOALS that allow us to predict what the Milky Way will look like in the future.
Presenter: Dr. Sean Linden
Dr. Sean Linden received his PhD in the Spring of 2020 from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia working with Dr. Aaron Evans and Dr. Eric Murphy at the NRAO. He then moved to a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for three years working with Dr. Daniela Calzetti on studies of star clusters in nearby galaxies with JWST. Sean is currently the Peter A. Strittmatter Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona, and will be starting a new position as an assistant professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Rochester Institute of Technology next Fall.