Galactic Archaeology: decoding the fossil record of Galaxy formation and evolution

Abstract: One of most important issue in Astrophysics is the achievement of a robust understanding of the sequence of processes that contributed to the building up of the Milky Way. This is obviously important not only "on a local scale" in order to recover the history of formation and evolution of the Galaxy, but also, in general, for understanding the formation process of spiral galaxies. In the last decade, the advent of high precision photometric and spectroscopic surveys as well as the possibility to estimate, thanks to the ESA Gaia mission, accurate distance for a huge number of field stars is actually opening a new era for this kind of investigations.
In this seminar, we will review the common scenarios for the formation of the Milky Way, and present some recent results - obtained by using an updated observational and theoretical framework - about the early phases of the Milky Way formation and evolution.

Short bio:  Born February 15, 1968 in Messina, Italy, Santi Cassisi had the Degree in Physics at the University of Pisa in 1991 (Title of the thesis: ‘Evolutionary properties of primeval stellar populations) and the PhD at the University of L’Aquila, 1997 (Title of the thesis: ‘Evolutionary and pulsation properties of stellar populations’).
He is full professor (“dirigente di ricerca”) at the INAF – Astronomical Observatory of Abruzzo – Teramo (Italy).
Since the 2022, Cassisi is member of the administrative board of the “Fundacion Galileo Galilei - Fundacion Canaria”, which manages the Galileo National Telescope (TNG) at La Palma (Canary Island – Spain).
He has special mention for the 1999 Livio Gratton Prize, and for the ‘Dott. G. Borgia’ prize of the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 2003.
Santi Cassisi is author of about 490 publications - of which 308 ones are papers in peer-review journals - with about 23500 citations and an H-index of 81.
Cassisi is also author of two books for professional researchers and university students:

• M. Salaris & S. Cassisi: “Evolution of Stars and Stellar Populations” ed. Wiley and Sons’, 
London, 2005;
• S. Cassisi & M. Salaris: “Old Stellar Populations: How to Study the Fossil Record of Galaxy 
Formation”, ed. ‘Wiley-VCH’, Berlin, 2013.

His general research interests are on: theoretical stellar astrophysics; stellar evolution and computation of models for very low, low- and intermediate-mass stellar structures, evolutionary tracks and isochrones for simple and composite stellar populations; interpretation of observed Colour-Magnitude- Diagrams of field stars, globular and open clusters; the Multiple Population phenomenon in Galactic globular clusters; checking of the accuracy and reliability of stellar models; testing of the reliability of the physical inputs adopted in computing stellar models; computation of evolutionary models of very low mass stars and analysis of the initial mass function both in the field and in stellar clusters; calibration of stellar primary distance indicators and their use for deriving the distance to galactic and extragalactic stellar systems; use of the stellar observables for deriving the value of parameters of cosmological relevance as the chemical composition of primordial matter, the age of the Universe and the Hubble constant. 
Cassisi has given several courses about: theoretical stellar astrophysics, stellar population, distance and age indicators, Galactic archaeology, star clusters, computational astrophysics, etc, in various national and international universities and research institutes.

Where: Accademia Pontaniana, Via Mezzocannone 8, 80134 Napoli NA. The colloquium will be also broadcast online, on Zoom.
How to join online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84640651456?pwd=TlpSNkZKK25MVkxFdngySm1HZTh4QT09
Meeting ID: 846 4065 1456
Passcode: 656302