The Milky Way Assembly Tale - Plot and characters as of today, and what to expect in future editions

 

Our knowledge of the Milky Way's assembly history has been revolutionised by the advent of the Gaia mission. Since the availability of kinematic information for more than 1 billion stars with Gaia DR2, the story of how our Galaxy was formed from the merger of smaller galaxies has begun to unravel. Gaia's handwriting has been supported by the combination of its dynamical information with chemical abundance and age measurements from spectroscopic (e.g. APOGEE, GALAH, GES, LAMOST, RAVE) and asteroseismic (e.g. CoRoT, Kepler, K2, TESS) surveys, which are now adding more detail to the plot. However, as the plot unravels, it becomes more and more complex. Observations and models need to move forward in tandem to support its evolution and uncover possible twists. Future large-scale spectroscopic surveys will greatly improve our chemical knowledge of the Milky Way's stellar populations and, together with future asteroseismic missions, will open the window to systematic determination of accurate stellar ages as a new ink to fuel the writing.

 

With the rapid pace at which the Milky Way assembly story is constantly being updated, the aim of this conference is to bring the community onto the same page, where the main characters, their characteristics and the timeline of their contribution are well established, and where the main observational and theoretical open questions for the continuation of the story are set out and discussed.

 

The topics to be covered at the conference are as follows

 

• Substructures of the Milky Way halo, in the chemical-dynamical-chronological space;
   
• Evolution of the Milky Way disk through the interplay with the assembling mergers;
   
• Stellar age as a critical component - development of new methods to infer age with increased precision and accuracy and cosmological implications;
   
• Predictions from simulations as a tool for interpreting the complex observational evidence;
   
• The assembly history of the Local Group.

 

Important information on unsolicited requests for hotels bookings

Please note that the official partner of the "Milky Way Tale Conference" is Planning Congressi srl (https://planning.it/). We urge caution in case you receive unsolicited offers to provide hotel rooms or other services from different companies, or unsolicited phone calls requesting, e.g., to confirm your hotel reservations. We strongly advise you not to contact them or provide them with any of your personal details, and cannot accept any responsibility for adverse consequences should you choose to do so. In case of any questions, please kindly contact Planning at r.suzzi@planning.it.