Project description
A detailed map of the Milky Way’s early formation
The Milky Way’s history is full of mysteries, especially regarding its earliest days. While the Gaia mission has so far provided detailed insights into the galaxy’s structure and evolution, it struggles to reveal information about the first generations of stars that can be observed as extremely metal-poor stars. These are very rare, but hold important clues. The ERC-funded EARLYMW project will advance surveys, specifically WEAVE and 4MOST, to study these early stars across different galactic environments. Researchers will analyse their chemical makeup, compare results with simulations and then map early supernova contributions, ultimately aiming to uncover how the Milky Way evolved during its first billion years.
Objective
The Gaia mission is providing many details on the dynamical complexity of our Galaxy, now and in the past. However, the picture of the Milky Way history becomes very incomplete at early times. The scarcity of well-studied early generations stars throughout different environments, represented by the lowest metallicity stars, limits us severely to study the era of First Stars and early Galaxy assembly. Next generation massively multiplexed instruments will soon complement Gaia astrometry to its faint limit with crucial radial velocities and chemical abundance patterns. Specifically, the Northern WEAVE and Southern 4MOST surveys will finally provide the high-priority targeting of the most metal-poor stars in low- and high-resolution needed.
The aim of this EARLYMW ERC is to use these surveys to move the known history of our Galaxy back much farther to the first billion years after the Big Bang. I am in a unique position to make this step up from analysis of scarce individual stars to population studies, as I am leading the relevant very metal-poor target selection and survey efforts. To achieve the aim, my team and I will, after careful correction for selection effects (i) compare the chemical enrichment of early generations across Galactic components, and (ii) follow up very metal-poor tails of dynamical substructures and assess their dependence on progenitor properties. We will then compare our findings with cosmological simulations varying assumptions on early chemical enrichment.
This EARLYMW project will, for the first time, provide a complete census of very metal-poor stars across various Milky Way components and quantitatively assess early enrichment processes as function of environment. Our results will constrain physical parameters for early Universe enrichment and map contributions of early supernovae explosions at much smaller scales than possible at high redshift. EARLYMW will deliver a quantitative picture of the proto-galaxy that became our Milky Way.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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9712CP Groningen
Netherlands
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