Related papers: Modelling the Galaxy for GAIA
There is now compelling evidence in favour of the hierarchical structure formation paradigm. Semi-analytic modelling is a powerful tool which allows the formation and evolution of galaxies to be followed in a hierarchical framework. We…
Demographic studies of cosmic populations must contend with measurement errors and selection effects. We survey some of the key ideas astronomers have developed to deal with these complications, in the context of galaxy surveys and the…
An important goal of helio- and asteroseismology is to improve the modelling of stellar evolution. Here I provide a brief discussion of some of the uncertain issues in stellar modelling, of possible relevance to asteroseismic inferences.
Explainable AI (XAI) has a counterpart in analytical modeling which we refer to as model explainability. We tackle the issue of model explainability in the context of prediction models. We analyze a dataset of loans from a credit card…
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…
In this review, I provide an overview of theoretical aspects related to the evolution of galaxies as a function of environment. I discuss the main physical processes at play, their characteristic time-scales and environmental dependency,…
Data analysis methods have always been of critical importance for quantitative sciences. In astronomy, the increasing scale of current and future surveys is driving a trend towards a separation of the processes of low-level data reduction…
A review on numerical simulations of galaxy formation is given. Different numerical methods to solve collisionless and gas dynamical systems are outlined and one particular simulation technique, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, is discussed…
The GAIA Galactic survey satellite will obtain photometry in 15 filters of over 10^9 stars in our Galaxy across a very wide range of stellar types. No other planned survey will provide so much photometric information on so many stars. I…
We develop a simple, fast and predictive model of the hierarchical formation of galaxies which is in quantitative agreement with observations. Comparing simulations with observations we place constraints on the density of the universe and…
We consider what is the best way to extract science from large surveys of the Milky Way galaxy. The diversity of data gathered in these surveys, together with our position within the Galaxy, imply that science must be extracted by fitting…
The analysis of gravitational wave data involves many model selection problems. The most important example is the detection problem of selecting between the data being consistent with instrument noise alone, or instrument noise and a…
We perform realistic simulations of the Sun's birth cluster in order to predict the current distribution of solar siblings in the Galaxy. We study the possibility of finding the solar siblings in the Gaia catalogue by using only positional…
The ESA Gaia mission, to be launched during 2013, will observe billions of objects, among which many galaxies, during its scanning of the sky. This will provide a large space-based dataset with unprecedented spatial resolution. Because of…
Our Galaxy is a complex machine in which several processes operate simultaneously: metal-poor gas is accreted, is chemically enriched by dying stars, and then drifts inwards, surrendering its angular momentum to stars; new stars are formed…
We describe a new, free and open source semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, Galacticus. The Galacticus model was designed to be highly modular to facilitate expansion and the exploration of alternative descriptions of key physical…
The ESA cornerstone mission Gaia was successfully launched in 2013, and is now scanning the sky to accurately measure the positions and motions of about two billion point-like sources of 3<V<20.5 mag, with the main goal of reconstructing…
The Galaxy and the stars in it form a hierarchical system, such that the properties of individual stars are influenced by those of the Galaxy. Here, an approach is described which uses hierarchical Bayesian models to simultaneously and…
Large, freely available, well-maintained data sets have made astronomy a popular playground for machine learning projects. Nevertheless, robust insights gained to both machine learning and physics could be improved by clarity in problem…
Theoretical atmosphere models provide the basis for a variety of applications in astronomy. In simplified one-dimensional (1D) atmosphere models, convection is usually treated with the mixing length theory despite its well-known…