A primary research goal in Milky Way studies is unravelling its formation history, which means revealing the origins of the stars born within. Statistical methods allow you to group stars at similar positions, with similar kinematics, and similar chemical compositions, and therefore presumably similar origins.

Using phylogenetic trees from evolutionary biology

• Jofre, Das, Betranpetit, and Foley (2017)
• Jofre & Das (2018)

Using gaussian mixture models

• Das, Hawkins, and Jofre (2020)