Related papers: GAIA: Understanding the Galaxy
The performance expected from a galaxy survey to be carried out with GAIA, the GAIA Galaxy Survey, is outlined. From a statistical model of galaxy number density, size and surface brightness distribution, and from detailed numerical…
We discuss the impact that Gaia, a European Space Agency (ESA) cornerstone mission that has been in scientific operations since July 2014, is expected to have on the definition of the cosmic distance ladder and the study of resolved stellar…
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…
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…
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 GAIA satellite will provide unprecedented phase-space information for our Galaxy and enable a new era of Galactic dynamics. We may soon see successful realizations of Galactoseismology, i.e., inferring the characteristics of the…
Star clusters are among the first celestial objects catalogued by early astronomers. As simple and coeval populations, their study has been instrumental in charting the properties of the Milky Way and providing insight into stellar…
The Gaia mission has revolutionized our view of the Milky Way and its satellite citizens. The field of Galactic Archaeology has been piecing together the formation and evolution of the Galaxy for decades, and we have made great strides,…
We evaluate the potential of the ESA Cornerstone Mission GAIA in helping populate the database of nearby stars ($d < 25$ pc) for subsequent target selection for DARWIN/TPF. The GAIA high-precision astrometric measurements will make it an…
Gaia is a very ambitious mission of the European Space Agency. At the heart of Gaia lie the measurements of the positions, distances, space motions, brightnesses and astrophysical parameters of stars, which represent fundamental pillars of…
Gaia is a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) selected in 2000, with a target launch date of 2011. The Gaia mission will perform a survey of about 1 billion sources brighter than V=20. Its goal is to provide astrometry…
Knowledge of ages for stars formed over a galaxy's lifetime is fundamental to understand its formation and evolution. However, stellar ages are difficult to obtain since they cannot be measured from observations, being comparison with…
The hierarchical model of galaxy formation predicts that the Milky Way halo is populated by tidal debris of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Due to long dynamical times, debris from the lowest mass objects remains coherent as thin and…
We discuss the tracing of star formation histories with ESA's space astrometry mission GAIA, emphasizing the advantages of AGB stars for this purpose. GAIA's microarcsecond-level astrometry, multi-band photometry and spectroscopy will…
The Gaia mission, with its unprecedented astrometric and photometric precision, combined with its Radial Velocity Spectrometer, will provide to the astronomical community a wealth of necessary constraints to disentangle between the…
Gaia is an ambitious space astrometry mission of ESA with a main objective to map the sky in astrometry and photometry down to a magnitude 20 by the end of the next decade. While the mission is built and operated by ESA and an industrial…
Gaia is the next astrometry mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), following up on the success of the Hipparcos mission. With a focal plane containing 106 CCD detectors, Gaia will survey the entire sky and repeatedly observe the…
The GAIA mission will produce an extraordinary database from which we should be able to deduce not only the Galaxy's current structure, but also much of its history, and thus cast a powerful light on the way in which galaxies in general are…
The standard cosmological model ($\Lambda$-CDM) predicts that galaxies are built through hierarchical assembly on cosmological timescales$^{1,2}$. The Milky Way, like other disc galaxies, underwent violent mergers and accretion of small…
In its all-sky survey, the ESA global astrometry mission Gaia will perform high-precision astrometry and photometry for 1 billion stars down to $V = 20$ mag. The data collected in the Gaia catalogue, to be published by the end of the next…