How the Milky Way Built its Disk

If we could map the global structure of the Milky Way's stellar disk,
looking only at stars of a given age or abundance, it would be a
direct route to delineating empirically how a typical large galaxy
disk was built up. We have solved the problem of how to look at our
own Galaxy this way, using large ground-based spectroscopic surveys.
I will show how the overall radial and vertical structure of the Milky
Way's disk changes as a function of stellar abundances, which may
serve as proxies for stellar ages.  Through comparison with disk
formation simulations, I will also discuss what this may mean for the
build-up of the Milky Way disk and its evolution.  Slicing the Milky
Way's disk into sets of such stellar mono-abundance populations is
also proving a powerful way of constraining the Galactic potential.