Related papers: GAIA: Understanding the Galaxy
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy comprising three main components: the Bulge, the Disk, and the Halo. Of particular interest is the Galactic disk, which holds a significant portion of the baryonic matter angular momentum and harbors at…
Gaia is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006, following a study in which the original interferometric concept was changed to a direct-imaging…
The Milky Way serves as a template for understanding the formation and evolution of late-type massive disk galaxies since we can obtain detailed chemical and kinematic information for large samples of individual stars. However, the early…
The second data release of ESA's Gaia satellite (Gaia DR2) revolutionised astronomy by providing accurate distances, proper motions, apparent magnitudes, and in many cases temperatures and radial velocities for an unprecedented number of…
Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) are amongst the fastest objects in our Milky Way. These stars are predicted to come from the Galactic center (GC) and travel along unbound orbits across the Galaxy. In the coming years, the ESA satellite Gaia will…
The Gaia-ESO Survey is a public spectroscopic survey that has targeted $\gtrsim10^5$ stars covering all major components of the Milky Way from the end of 2011 to 2018, delivering its public final release in May 2022. Unlike other…
Gaia is an ESA cornerstone mission, which was successfully launched December 2013 and commenced operations in July 2014. Within the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis consortium, Coordination Unit 7 (CU7) is responsible for the variability…
In this paper we introduce a new method for analysing Milky Way phase-space which allows us to reveal the imprint left by the Milky Way bar and spiral arms on the stars with full phase-space data in Gaia Data Release 2. The unprecedented…
The first data release from the Gaia mission contains accurate positions and magnitudes for more than a billion sources, and proper motions and parallaxes for the majority of the 2.5~million Hipparcos and Tycho-2 stars. We describe three…
The Milky Way galaxy is a typical spiral galaxy which consists of a black hole in its centre, a barred bulge and a disk which contains spiral arms. The complex structure of the Galaxy makes it extremely difficult and challenging to model…
We propose to the community a comprehensive UV/optical/NIR imaging survey of Galactic star formation regions to probe all aspects of the star formation process. The primary goal of such a study is to understand the evolution of…
As we strive to understand how galaxies evolve it is crucial that we resolve physical processes and test emerging theories in nearby systems that we can observe in great detail. Our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, and the nearby Magellanic…
ESA's Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics (GAIA) holds the promise of mapping out the detailed phase space structure of the Galactic halo by providing unprecedented annual proper motion and parallax of $1-10\muas$ astrometric…
Using our rich observations within the Milky Way to better understand galaxy evolution requires understanding what the Milky Way looks like "as a galaxy" -- that is, its "true" shape and abundance profiles (unskewed by observational…
Stellar physical and dynamical properties are essential knowledge to understanding the structure, formation, and evolution of our Galaxy. We produced an all-sky uniformly derived catalog of stellar astrophysical parameters (APs; age, mass,…
Stellar halos of galaxies retain crucial clues to their mass assembly history. It is in these galactic components that the remains of cannibalised galactic building blocks are deposited. For the case of the Milky Way, the opportunity to…
The Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus was the last major merger and central turning point in the Milky Way's story. This event, comparable in mass to the Large Magellanic Cloud today, left behind significant debris that provides valuable insights into…
The Gaia-ESO Survey was designed to target all major Galactic components (i.e., bulge, thin and thick discs, halo and clusters), with the goal of constraining the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Milky Way. This paper presents the…
Galaxy formation is at the forefront of observation and theory in cosmology. An improved understanding is essential for improving our knowledge both of the cosmological parameters, of the contents of the universe, and of our origins. In…
The characteristics of Gaia catalogues, such as trigonometric parallaxes and proper motions of stars, are discussed. Radial velocities of stars are also important for studying spatial motions. The most important results of the kinematics…