Context: If the Galaxy is axisymmetric and in dynamical equilibrium, we expect negligible fluctuations in the residual line-of-sight velocity field. However, non-axisymmetric structures like a bar, spiral arms and merger events can generate velocity fluctuations. Recent results using the APOGEE survey claim significant fluctuations in velocity for stars in the mid plane (|z|<0.25 kpc) out to 5 kpc and suggest that the dynamical influence of the Milky Way's bar extends out to the Solar neighborhood.

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Khanna_velfluc_MW.pdf

Using GALAH survey data of nearby stars, we look at how structure in the planar (u,v) velocity distribution depends on metallicity and on viewing direction within the Galaxy. In nearby stars, with distance d < 1 kpc, the Hercules stream is most strongly seen in higher metallicity stars [Fe/H] > 0.2. The Hercules stream peak v value depends on viewed galactic longitude, which we interpret as due to the gap between the stellar stream and more circular orbits being associated with a specific angular momentum value of about 1640 km/s kpc.

One of the main goals of the Galah survey is to find stellar siblings in the Galactic disk and associate them to a common parent cluster by means of chemistry and dynamics. The success of such chemical tagging hinges critically on our ability to determine the abundances of late-type dwarf and giant stars with high precision, but also to assess whether their present-day abundance patterns truly reflect their original compositions.

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Gao_M67.pdf

We present a study using the second data release of the GALAH survey of stellar parameters and elemental abundances of 15 pairs of stars identified by Oh et al. They identified these pairs as potentially co-moving pairs using proper motions and parallaxes from Gaia DR1. We find that 11 very wide (>1 pc) pairs of stars do in fact have similar Galactic orbits, while a further four claimed co-moving pairs are not truly co-orbiting.

Paper PDF: 

sty3042.pdf

One of the main motivations for the GALAH survey is to measure abundances of many elements in sufficiently large number of stars that some of them can be identified as stars that were born in the same cluster but all indications of this fact have been lost, except for the chemical fingerprint. Chemical tagging can reveal the connection between such stars, but state of the art observations and analytical methods will be needed to actually perform this task.

Paper PDF: 

Chemtag_short.pdf

The overlap between the spectroscopic Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey and Gaia provides a high-dimensional chemodynamical space of unprecedented size. We present a first analysis of a subset of this overlap, of 7066 dwarf, turn-off, and sub-giant stars. These stars have spectra from the GALAH survey and high parallax precision from the Gaia DR1 Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution. We investigate correlations between chemical compositions, ages, and kinematics for this sample.

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Buder_AandA_2019_624_A19_GALAH_TGAS.pdf

Around one percent of evolved stars are surprisingly rich in lithium, and the fraction rises with rising metallicity. Lithium is destroyed by proton capture at relatively low temperature, and in standard stellar evolution models it is depleted significantly in post-main-sequence evolution. A number of mechanisms have been proposed as the source of lithium in giant stars, based on their rareness and their tendency to be found near the red clump and the "bump" in the red giant branch luminosity function.

Paper PDF: 

Lithium_team_200428.pdf

We present a neural network autoencoder structure that is able to extract the most important latent spectral features from observed spectra and reconstruct a spectrum from those features. Because of the training process, the network is able to reproduce a spectrum of high signal to noise ratio that does not show any spectral peculiarities. Such generated spectra were used to identify various emission features among spectra acquired by multiple surveys using the HERMES spectrograph. Emission features were identified by a direct comparison of the observed and generated spectrum.

Paper PDF: 

galah_emission-line_stars.pdf

Almost all spiral galaxies have a second disk component, the thick disk, in addition to the thin disk which defines their disk structure. Thick disks are believed to be ancient structures that predates the formation of the thin disks, but how they fit in to the overall picture of galaxy formation remains unknown. Although our Galaxy has a thick disk, the properties of this ancient component are not yet well determined.

Paper PDF: 

thickdisk_paper_GALAH.pdf