Related papers: Galactic Archaeology with Gaia
Studies of stellar populations, understood to mean collections of stars with common spatial, kinematic, chemical, and/or age distributions, have been reinvigorated during the last decade by the advent of large-area sky surveys such as SDSS,…
Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) astrometry space mission, and a successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission. Gaia's main goal is to collect high-precision astrometric data (i.e. positions, parallaxes, and proper motions) for the brightest…
The body of photometric and astrometric data on stars in the Galaxy has been growing very fast in recent years (Hipparcos/Tycho, OGLE-3, 2-Mass, DENIS, UCAC2, SDSS, RAVE, Pan Starrs, Hermes, ...) and in two years ESA will launch the Gaia…
We address the problem of identifying remnants of satellite galaxies in the halo of our galaxy with Gaia data. The remnants have to be extracted from a very large data set (of order 10^9 stars) in the presence of observational errors and…
Recent dynamical analysis based on Gaia data have revealed major accretion events in Milky Way's history. Nevertheless, our understanding of the primordial Galaxy is hindered because the bona fide identification of the most metal-poor and…
Over the past decade, empirical constraints on the galaxy-dark matter halo connection have significantly advanced our understanding of galaxy evolution. Past techniques have focused on connections between halo properties and galaxy stellar…
It is now generally believed that galaxies were built up through gravitational amplification of primordial fluctuations and the subsequent merging of smaller precursor structures. The stars of the structures that assembled to form the Milky…
In its all-sky survey, Gaia will monitor astrometrically and photometrically millions of main-sequence stars with sufficient sensitivity to brown dwarf companions within a few AUs from their host stars and to transiting brown dwarfs on very…
Analytical and numerical galaxy-formation models indicate that active galactic nuclei (AGNs) likely play a prominent role in the formation and evolution of galaxies. However, quantifying this effect requires knowledge of how the nuclear…
Late accretion models for formation of the Galactic halo require that many Galactic satellite galaxies have been cannibalised into the halo field. Comparison of the metallicity and age distribution function of stars in the surviving…
The Milky Way's stellar halo, which extends to $>100$ kpc, encodes the evolutionary history of our Galaxy. However, most studies of the halo to date have been limited to within a few kpc of the Sun. Here, we characterize differences between…
We investigate the physical properties of the progenitors of today living Milky Way-like galaxies that are visible as Damped Lya Absorption systems and Lya Emitters at higher redshifts (z ~ 2.3,5.7). To this aim we use a statistical…
The star-formation histories of the main stellar components of the Milky Way constrain critical aspects of galaxy formation and evolution. I discuss recent determinations of such histories, together with their interpretation in terms of…
We have learned recently that the inner halo of the Milky Way contains a kinematically coherent component (Gaia-Enceladus) from a significant merger 10 Gyrs ago. By contrast the inner halo (defined to exclude the Magellanic Stream) contains…
The stellar populations of the stellar halo and of the thick disk of the Milky Way reveal much about the merging history that our Galaxy, a typical large disk galaxy, has experienced. Our current understanding, described here, implies a…
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…
We live in a universe filled with galaxies with an amazing variety of sizes and shapes. One of the biggest challenges for astronomers working in this field is to understand how all these types relate to each other in the background of an…
We use a cosmological galactic evolutionary approach to model the Milky Way. A detailed treatment of the mass aggregation and dynamical history of the growing dark halo is included, together with a self consistent physical treatment for the…
The Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) Survey is a massive observational project to trace the Milky Way's history of star formation, chemical enrichment, stellar migration and minor mergers. Using high-resolution (R$\simeq$28,000)…
Gaia DR2 has delivered full-sky 6-D measurements for millions of stars, and the quest to understand the dynamics of our Galaxy has entered a new phase. Our aim is to reveal and characterize the kinematic sub-structure of the different…