Supervisor: Arthur Alencastro Puls -- email: puls@camk.edu.pl
Title: Understanding the Milky Way Galaxy with Gaia
Time: 6-31 July (4 weeks)
Project description: The Gaia mission has become a major tool in the study of the Milky Way Galaxy. Its results have unveiled structures like the Gaia-Enceladus-Sausage accretion event. The combination of its exquisite kinematic data with results from other methods, like spectroscopy and asteroseismology, can be powerful in both answering old questions and raising new ones. The student will get familiar with Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3), and will understand its contents to be able to efficiently mine the data. There will be exercises involving the use of clustering algorithms to look for structures in the Galaxy, as well as the use of the Python package GalPy to calculate stellar orbits. The student will learn how to interpret diagrams commonly used in Galactic Archaeology. We will discuss the results of the exercises, how Gaia can be combined with different data, and the current limitations in the field.
Work plan: In the first phase, the student will get familiar with the main Gaia papers, the archive contents, and the main topics in the field of Galactic Archaeology. In the second phase, the student will learn how to extract data from the archive and the basics of its analysis. The third phase will be hands-on, executing the exercises. In the final phase we will discuss the results.
Requirements: Basic knowledge of Python.