Related papers: Galactic Archaeology with Gaia
Understanding how galaxies form in the early universe and their subsequent evolution through cosmic time is a major goal of modern astrophysics. Panchromatic look-back sky surveys significantly advanced the field in the past decades, and we…
We review the properties of globular clusters which make them useful for studying the Galactic halo, Galactic chemical evolution, and the early stages of the formation of the Milky Way. We review the evidence that GCs have a chemical…
The Gaia space project, planned for launch in 2011, is one of the ESA cornerstone missions, and will provide astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data of very high quality for about one billion stars brighter than V=20. This will…
Hundreds of globular clusters and dwarf galaxies encircle the Milky Way. Many of these systems have undergone partial disruption due to tidal forces, littering the halo with stellar streams. These tidal tails are sensitive to the Galactic…
How did galaxies form and evolve? This is one of the most challenging questions in astronomy to- day. Answering it requires a careful combination of observational and theoretical work to reliably determine the observed properties of cosmic…
Dramatic recent progress in understanding galactic chemical evolution (GCE) has been driven partly by direct observations of the distant past with HST and JWST of stellar abundances from giant high-resolution spectroscopic surveys (APOGEE,…
Continuum gamma-ray emission produced by interactions of cosmic rays with interstellar matter and radiation fields is a probe of non-thermal particle populations in galaxies. After decades of continuous improvements in experimental…
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…
Correlations between stellar kinematics and chemical abundances are fossil evidence for evolutionary connections between Galactic structural components. Extensive stellar surveys show that the only tolerably clear distinction between…
Stellar halos around galaxies retain fundamental evidence of the processes which lead to their build up. Sophisticated models of galaxy formation in a cosmological context yield quantitative predictions about various observable…
We study the possibility that the Milky Way's cool stellar disc includes mergers with ancient stars. Galaxies are understood to form in a hierarchical manner, where smaller (proto-)galaxies merge into larger ones. Stars in galaxies, like…
The stars of the Milky Way carry the chemical history of our Galaxy in their atmospheres as they journey through its vast expanse. Like barcodes, we can extract the chemical fingerprints of stars from high-resolution spectroscopy. The…
Stellar multiplicity is among the oldest and richest problems in astrophysics. Binary stars are a cornerstone of stellar mass and radius measurements that underpin modern stellar evolutionary models. Binaries are the progenitors of many of…
A short overview is presented of several topics concerning the evolution of the Milky Way (MW) in a cosmological context. In particular, the metallicity distribution of the MW halo is derived analytically and the halo metallicity and…
The Gaia mission has observed over 2 billion stars repeatedly across the entire sky over 10 years, revealing the many astronomical objects that vary on human timescales from seconds to years. Its repeated astrometric, photometric,…
Stellar Populations are the fossil record of Galactic evolution. Interpretation of this record in the Local Group allows one to determine reliably the dominant physics controlling the evolution of those galaxies which are typical of the…
Various programs aimed at exploring the still largely unknown low surface brightness Universe with deep imaging optical surveys have recently started. They open a new window for studies of galaxy evolution, pushing the technique of galactic…
The last 20 years have seen an explosion in our understanding of the large-scale distribution and motions of galaxies in the nearby universe. The field has moved from a largely qualitative, morphological description of the structures seen…
The Gaia space astrometry mission is measuring accurate distances and space motions of more than two billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. This is a first look at how Gaia is contributing to fundamental physics, and in particular…
Asteroseismology has the capability of delivering stellar properties which would otherwise be inaccessible, such as radii, masses and thus ages of stars. When this information is coupled with classical determinations of stellar parameters,…