Topic: Gaia

This workshop examines white-dwarf binaries as probes of stellar evolution, Galactic history and explosive transients. Observations and population modelling will address common-envelope evolution, angular-momentum loss, possible Type Ia supernova pathways and compact systems relevant to LISA. Participants will consider how Gaia, wide-field spectroscopy, time-domain surveys and new ESO instruments can constrain these mechanisms and connect binary populations with chemical enrichment and star formation. Registration fees apply.

Subha Majumdar presents a six-dimensional Milky Way phase-space catalogue designed to map stellar motions and dark matter beyond the reach of Gaia parallaxes alone. Gaia astrometry is combined with spectrophotometric distances and radial velocities from fourteen surveys, including DESI, SDSS-BOSS, APOGEE and LAMOST. The resulting catalogue contains about 33 million tracers and detailed distance–velocity measurements for roughly half a million halo stars. It characterizes distant clusters, dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, enabling mass modeling, kinematic studies, abundance mapping, Galactic