Paula Jofré
Chile – The Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos at Universidad
Galactic Phylogenetics: using evolutionary biology to understand galactic histories.
Abstract: Today, almost every evolutionary study use phylogenetic trees to reconstruct histories. These are graphs that illustrate the shared evolutionary history among a dataset, allowing us to understand the hierarchical pattern of ancestry and decent which connects all of the observations. Phylogenetic methods can reconstruct ancestral relationships as long as there is a shared history and a heritable process linking the data objects. These objects are normally individuals, species and higher taxa in biology, where methods to analyse them have been developed, but they are applicable more broadly. By making the hypothesis that the stars in galaxies come from the same but evolving interstellar medium (ISM), and that the evolutionary marker (i.e. the heritable component) of the ISM is the chemical composition, we can use the chemical abundances of stars as fossil records for building phylogenetic trees. In this talk I will present our latest results and lessons learnt in what happen when we borrow tools from other disciplines to contribute to galaxy evolution studies.