Matthieu Portail
MPE Garching
The Milky Way is a Rosetta stone for understanding how massive disk galaxies form and evolve. It is currently the subject of an extraordinary observational effort, providing data on a star-by-star basis for many stars in all kinds of galactic environments. However, to learn from this data how the Galaxy formed requires the construction of advanced dynamical models, that first characterize the current state of our Galaxy. In this talk I’ll review our latest results in dynamical and chemodynamical modelling of the Milky Way, starting from the bulge, bar and inner disk to finally extend to the Solar neighborhood. 1) Using the Made-to-measure method, we constructed the first non-parametric and self-consistent dynamical model of the galactic bar region, reproducing the density of red clump stars from a combination of VVV, UKIDSS and 2MASS data together with kinematics from the OGLE-II, BRAVA and ARGOS surveys. I will describe how this modelling allows the recovery of the stellar density, bar pattern speed and dark matter density profile, which is found to flatten to a shallow cusp or core in the bulge region. 2) I will describe how to extend the modelling to chemical phase-space and show the first Made-to-Measure chemodynamical model of the galactic bar, reproducing the spatial and kinematic variations of different metallicity components, as seen by the ARGOS and APOGEE surveys. 3) I will finally briefly discuss our latest results on the dynamical influence of the galactic bar on the Solar neighborhood kinematics, as seen in our best dynamical model of the Galaxy.