Josh Peek

Many of our questions in astronomy boil down to “how did it get to be this way?”. Since recombination and the dawn of structure, diffuse material has become dense through gravity, creating everything we see today from planets to spiral arms to galaxy clusters. Astronomers’ typical approach has been to look at static objects over cosmic time and connect them up to tell as story of cosmic growth and evolution. In this talk I will highlight a different approach — the study of the velocity structure of the diffuse material itself and examining how these flows converge to create structures and diverge to destroy them. I will outline my group’s foundational work in this nascent field of “Kinetic Tomography” and our successes in understanding the velocity field of the Milky Way, and how it relates to spiral theory and star formation. I will discuss branching out beyond the Milky Way into the Small Magellanic Cloud, and some of the very surprising things we have learned about this mysterious galaxy. Finally, I will touch on the work of many authors expanding this field in many new and exciting directions, and the bright future of Kinetic Tomography with the surveys of today and tomorrow.