ESSOG · Extracting science from surveys of our Galaxy

The goal is to put in place the infrastructure required to extract the promised science for large surveys of our Galaxy that are underway and will culminate in ESA's Cornerstone Mission Gaia. Dynamical models are fundamental to this process because surveys are heavily biased by the Sun's location in the Galaxy. Novel dynamical models will be built and novel methods of fitting them to the data developed. With their help we will be able to constrain the distribution of dark matter in the Galaxy. By modelling the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Galaxy we expect to be able to infer much information about how the Galaxy was assembled, and thus test the prevailing cosmological paradigm. During the grant period we will be applying our tools to ground-based surveys, but the first version of the Gaia Catalogue will become available at the end of the grant period, and our goal is to have everything ready and tested for its prompt exploitation.