Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

Dynamical imprints of the evolutionary history of the Milky Way

Objective

Galactic Astronomy is entering a new era, driven by state-of-the-art instrumentation and large surveys, and by the dramatic leaps in our understanding of galaxy formation provided by the cosmological LCDM framework. These surveys have shown that the Galaxy is up for discoveries every single month, and have revealed the first footprints of past mergers. This Era will reach its summit when the Gaia mission, scheduled for launch in 2011, provides the much-awaited survey of Galactic phase-space for a billion stars. This motivates us to propose a program that will provide a comprehensive view of the dynamical imprints leftover from the Galaxy s evolutionary history. This program will address the following key questions: How much memory does a galaxy like the Milky Way retain of its past? What is the relative importance of internally driven (secular processes) and externally acquired (mergers) phase-space substructure? What was the merging history of the Galaxy? Is the Galaxy consistent with LCDM? This ambitious program will advance the field of Galactic archaeology beyond the state-of-the-art thanks to two developments: the Aquarius Project simulations and the RAVE spectroscopic survey. The Aquarius are the largest ever cosmological simulations of a Milky Way dark matter halo. When complemented with a recently built phenomenological galaxy formation model, these superb simulations will serve for comparisons to the latest observational datasets, and in particular to the RAVE survey that is providing a fantastic dynamical map of the Solar vicinity. This will enable us to be in prime position to exploit the first Gaia data release in 2013, and before the end of this Research Program, to harvest its key scientific goal, namely to unravel the assembly history of the Milky Way.

Call for proposal

ERC-2009-StG
See other projects for this call

Host institution

RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN
EU contribution
€ 1 613 680,00
Address
Broerstraat 5
9712CP Groningen
Netherlands

See on map

Region
Noord-Nederland Groningen Overig Groningen
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Principal investigator
Amina Helmi (Prof.)
Administrative Contact
H.D. Veldhuis (Dr.)
Links
Total cost
No data

Beneficiaries (1)