Related papers: Optimising GAIA: How do we meet the science challe…
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…
The Milky Way provides an ideal laboratory to test our understanding of galaxy evolution, owing to our ability to observe our Galaxy over fine scales. However, connecting the Galaxy to the wider galaxy population remains difficult, due to…
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…
The Gaia Galactic survey mission is designed and optimized to obtain astrometry, photometry, and spectroscopy of nearly two billion stars in our Galaxy. Yet as an all-sky multi-epoch survey, Gaia also observes several million extragalactic…
Near-future data from ESA's Gaia mission will provide precise, full phase-space information for hundreds of millions of stars out to heliocentric distances of ~10 kpc. This "horizon" for full phase-space measurements is imposed by the Gaia…
The Gaia mission has provided the largest ever astrometric chart of the Milky Way. Using it to map the Galactic halo is helpful for disentangling its merger history. The identification of halo stars in Gaia DR2 with reliable distance…
The center of the Milky Way is a unique environment of great astrophysical interest, but its extreme crowding and extinction make it difficult to study. The GALACTICNUCLEUS survey, a high-angular-resolution near-infrared imaging program,…
We present a new theoretical population synthesis model (the Galaxy Model) to examine and deal with large amounts of data from surveys of the Milky Way and to decipher the present and past structure and history of our own Galaxy. We assume…
We describe the preliminary results of a ground-based observing campaign aimed at building a grid of approximately 200 spectro-photometric standard stars (SPSS), with an internal $\simeq 1$\% accuracy (and sub-percent precision), tied to…
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…
Context. Gaia is an ESA cornerstone mission launched on 19 December 2013 aiming to obtain the most complete and precise 3D map of our Galaxy by observing more than one billion sources. This paper is part of a series of documents explaining…
Galactic Archaeology, i.e. the use of chemo-dynamical information for stellar samples covering large portions of the Milky Way to infer the dominant processes involved in its formation and evolution, is now a powerful method thanks to the…
A proper understanding of the Milky Way (MW) dwarf galaxies in a cosmological context requires knowledge of their 3D velocities and orbits. However, proper motion (PM) measurements have generally been of limited accuracy and available only…
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…
We present a novel, data-driven analysis of Galactic dynamics, using unsupervised machine learning -- in the form of density estimation with normalizing flows -- to learn the underlying phase space distribution of 6 million nearby stars…
We validate the Bond et al. (2010) kinematic models for the Milky Way's disk and halo stars with Gaia Data Release 3 data. Bond et al. constructed models for stellar velocity distributions using stellar radial velocities measured by the…
Cosmological galaxy formation simulations are still limited by their spatial/mass resolution and cannot model from first principles some of the processes, like star formation, that are key in driving galaxy evolution. As a consequence they…
We model the local stellar velocity field using position and velocity measurements for 4M stars from the second data release of Gaia. We determine the components of the mean or bulk velocity in ~27k spatially-defined bins. Our assumption is…
A 30 m class optical/near-IR telescope in the Northern Hemisphere, equipped for diffraction-limited imaging and high-resolution, multi-object spectroscopy of faint stars, would enable a transformational investigation of the formation and…
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…