Related papers: Gaia FGK Benchmark Stars and their reference param…
What else can be said about star formation rate indicators that has not been said already many times over? The `coming of age' of large ground-based surveys and the unprecedented sensitivity, angular resolution and/or field-of-view of…
The determination of photospheric abundances in late-type stars from spectroscopic observations is a well-established field, built on solid theoretical foundations. Improving those foundations to refine the accuracy of the inferred…
Context: Many if not most planetary nebulae (PNe) are now thought to be the outcome of binary evolutionary scenarios. However only a few percent of PNe in the Milky Way are known to host binary systems. The high precision repeated observing…
During the early merger of the Milky Way, intermediate-mass black holes in merged dwarf galaxies may have been ejected from the center of their host galaxies due to gravitational waves, carrying some central stars along. This process can…
Gaia's very accurate astrometric measurements will allow the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) to be improved by a few orders of magnitude in the optical. Several sets of quasars are used to define a kinematically stable…
Spectral evolution models are a widely used tool for determining the stellar content of galaxies. I provide a review of the latest developments in stellar atmosphere and evolution models, with an emphasis on massive stars. In contrast to…
The Gaia mission has triggered major developments in the field of Galactic dynamics in recent years, which we discuss in this review. The structure and kinematics of all Galactic components - disc, bar/bulge and halo - are now mapped in…
The Gaia-ESO Survey (GES) is a large public spectroscopic survey that was carried out using the multi-object FLAMES spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope. The survey provides accurate radial velocities, stellar parameters, and elemental…
Reliable stellar atmospheric parameters are essential for probing stellar structure and evolution, and for stellar population studies. However, various deviations appear in comparisons with different ground-based spectroscopic surveys. We…
Among the myriad of data collected by the ESA Gaia satellite, about 150 million spectra will be delivered by the Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) for stars as faint as G_RVS~16. A specific stellar parametrization will be performed for…
We present a review of recent studies of the formation and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy, in particular based on large samples of non-kinematically selected stars with available proper motions. The Milky Way is argued to be a reasonable…
Studying our Galaxy, the Milky Way (MW), gives us a close-up view of the interplay between cosmology, dark matter, and galaxy formation. In the next decade our understanding of the MW's dynamics, stellar populations, and structure will…
The search for extrasolar planets has developed rapidly and, today, more than 1700 planets have been found orbiting stars. Thanks to Gaia, we will collect high-accuracy astrometric orbits of thousands of new low-mass celestial objects, such…
Accurate determinations of atmospheric parameters (effective temperature $T_{\rm eff}$, surface gravity log $g$ and metallicity [Fe/H]) and distances for large complete samples are of vital importance for various Galactic studies. We have…
Although rare, massive stars, being the main sources of ionizing radiation, chemical enrichment and mechanical energy in the Galaxy, are the most important objects of the stellar population. This review presents the many different aspects…
We present a mock catalog of Milky Way stars, matching in volume and depth the content of the Gaia data release 2 (GDR2). We generated our catalog using Galaxia, a tool to sample stars from a Besancon Galactic model, together with a…
The spatial distribution of Galactic stars with different chemical abundances encodes information on the processes that drove the formation and evolution of the Milky Way. Survey selection functions are indispensable for analysing…
The Gaia DR2 catalog is the best source of stellar astrometric and photometric data available today. The history of the Milky Way galaxy is written in stone in this data set. Parallaxes and photometry tell us where the stars are today, when…
Gaia will provide parallaxes and proper motions with accuracy ranging from 10 to 1000 microarcsecond on up to one billion stars. Most of these will be disk stars: for an unreddened K giant at 6 kpc, it will measure the distance accurate to…
High-precision spectroscopy of large stellar samples plays a crucial role for several topical issues in astrophysics. Examples include studying the chemical structure and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy, tracing the origin of chemical…