English

Winding, Unwinding, Rewinding the Gaia Phase Spiral

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-03-11 v1

Abstract

The Gaia Space Satellite has transformed the field of Galactic Dynamics by collecting 6D phase space information for hundreds of millions of stars. In 2018, it enabled the discovery of the Gaia Phase Spiral (Antoja et al., 2018), a clear signal in the vertical motion of the stars that reveals how far from equilibrium the Galactic disk is. Seven years after the discovery of this structure, a workshop dedicated to the Phase Spiral took place at the Lorentz Center. Workshop participants summarized the current state of knowledge about the Phase Spiral and identified open questions and key areas to continue progressing in understanding the origin of the Phase Spiral and the physics governing the response of the disk to perturbations. Here, we aim to summarize the content and discussions of this workshop, share the resources that have been produced at this workshop with the broader community, and invite interested individuals to join on the projects that started.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.09015,
  title  = {Winding, Unwinding, Rewinding the Gaia Phase Spiral},
  author = {Neige Frankel and Marcin Semczuk and Teresa Antoja and Sukanya Chakrabarti and Rimpei Chiba and Robert Grand and Jason Hunt and Sergey khoperskov and Zhao-Yu Li and Artem Lutsenko and Pau Ramos and Kiyan Tavangar and Lawrence Widrow},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.09015},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 1 figure, conference summary submitted to PASP