Search Publications
Gaia's binary star renaissance
El-Badry, Kareem
Stellar multiplicity is among the oldest and richest problems in astrophysics. Binary stars are a cornerstone of stellar mass and radius measurements that underpin modern stellar evolutionary models. Binaries are the progenitors of many of the most interesting and exotic astrophysical phenomena, ranging from type Ia supernovae to gamma ray bursts,…
Galactic Archaeology with Gaia
Belokurov, Vasily; Deason, Alis J.
The Gaia mission has revolutionized our view of the Milky Way and its satellite citizens. The field of Galactic Archaeology has been piecing together the formation and evolution of the Galaxy for decades, and we have made great strides, with often limited data, towards discovering and characterizing the subcomponents of the Galaxy and its building…
The Gaia white dwarf revolution
Munday, James; Sahu, Snehalata; Tremblay, Pier-Emmanuel +4 more
This review highlights the role of the Gaia space mission in transforming white dwarf research. These stellar remnants constitute 5%–7% of the local stellar population in volume, yet before Gaia the lack of trigonometric parallaxes hindered their identification. The mission's Data Release 2 in 2018 provided the first unbiased colour-absolute magni…
How Gaia sheds light on the Milky Way star cluster population
Casamiquela, L.; Cantat-Gaudin, T.
Star clusters are among the first celestial objects catalogued by early astronomers. As simple and coeval populations, their study has been instrumental in charting the properties of the Milky Way and providing insight into stellar evolution through the 20th century. Clusters were traditionally spotted as local stellar overdensities in the plane o…
Observations of pre- and proto-brown dwarfs in nearby clouds: Paving the way to further constraining theories of brown dwarf formation
Lee, Chang Won; Dunham, Michael M.; Palau, Aina +2 more
Brown Dwarfs (BDs) are crucial objects in our understanding of both star and planet formation, as well as in our understanding of what mechanisms shape the lower end of the Initial Mass Function (IMF). However, since the discovery of the first BD in 1995, there is still an unconcluded debate about which is the dominant formation mechanism of these…