Related papers: Optimising GAIA: How do we meet the science challe…
We present the results of realistic end-to-end simulations of observations of nearby stars with the proposed global astrometry mission GAIA, recently recommended within the context of ESA's Horizon 2000 Plus long-term scientific program. We…
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…
Upcoming next generation galactic surveys, such as GAIA and HERMES, will deliver unprecedented detail about the structure and make-up of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and promise to radically improve our understanding of it. However, to…
Recent observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of massive galaxies at ages below 1 Gyr pose a challenge to standard models of galaxy formation, which predict significantly longer assembly timescales. One possible explanation…
Future space and ground-based survey programmes will produce an impressive amount of photometric data. The GAIA space mission will map the complete sky down to mag V=20 and produce time series for about 1 billion stars. Survey instruments…
Context: With the data releases from the astrometric space mission Gaia, the exploration of the structure of the Milky Way has developed in unprecedented detail and unveiled many previously unknown structures in the Galactic disc and halo.…
Setting the timeline of the events which shaped the Milky Way disc through its 13 billion year old history is one of the major challenges in the theory of galaxy formation. Achieving this goal is possible using late-type stars, which in…
Context: Deep GALEX UV data show that the extreme outskirts of some spiral galaxies are teeming with star formation. Such young stellar populations evolving so far away from the bulk of their host galaxies challenge our overall…
The Milky Way's inner region is dominated by a stellar bar and a boxy-peanut shaped bulge. However, which stellar populations inhabit the inner Galaxy or how star formation proceeded there is still unknown. The difficulty in studying these…
The growing trove of precision astrometric observations from the Gaia space telescope and other surveys is revealing the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way in ever more exquisite detail. We summarize the current status of our…
Gaia will be ESA's milestone astrometric mission, and is due for launch at the end of 2013. Gaia will repeatedly map the whole sky measuring about one billion sources to V=20-22 mag. Its data products will be {\mu}as accuracy astrometry,…
We aim to demonstrate the scientific potential of the Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) for the study of the Milky Way structure and evolution. We used astrometric positions, proper motions, parallaxes, and photometry from EDR3 to select…
The advent of Gaia's 2nd data release in combination with large spectroscopic surveys are revolutionizing our understanding of the Galaxy. Thanks to these and the knowledge accumulated thus far, a more mature picture of the evolution of the…
The formation and evolution of the Milky Way's disc, bar, and bulge remain fundamentally limited by the lack of a contiguous, Galaxy-wide, high-precision chemo-dynamical map. Key open questions - including the survival or destruction of the…
The Gaia-ESO survey is a large public spectroscopic survey aimed at investigating the origin and formation history of our Galaxy by collecting spectroscopy of representative samples (about 10^5 Milky Way stars) of all Galactic stellar…
With the most recent Gaia data release the number of sources with complete 6D phase space information (position and velocity) has increased to well over 33 million stars, while stellar astrophysical parameters are provided for more than 470…
GAIA is an astrometric satellite which has been approved by the European Space Agency for launch in about 2010. It will measure the angles between objects in fields that are separated on the sky by about a radian. Data will stream…
Before the publication of the Gaia Catalogue, the contents of the first data release have undergone multiple dedicated validation tests. These tests aim at analysing in-depth the Catalogue content to detect anomalies, individual problems in…
We present an updated version of the semi-analytic Just-Jahrei{\ss} (JJ) model of the Galactic disk and constrain its parameters in the Solar neighbourhood. The new features of the JJ model include a simple two-component gaseous disk, a…
The ESA Cornerstone Mission GAIA, to be launched prior to 2012 and with a nominal lifetime of 5 years, will improve the accuracy of Hipparcos astrometry by more than two orders of magnitude. GAIA high-precision global astrometric…