Stellar archaeology with Gaia: the Galactic white dwarf population

Gaia will identify several 1e5 white dwarfs, most of which will be in the solar neighborhood at distances of a few hundred parsecs. Ground-based optical follow-up spectroscopy of this sample of stellar remnants is essential to unlock the enormous scientific potential it holds for our understanding of stellar evolution, and the Galactic formation history of both stars and planets.Comment: Summary of a talk at the 'Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade' conference in La Palma, March 2015, to be published in ASP Conference Series (editors Ian Skillen & Scott Trager

Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade: A Conference Summary

I present a highly-biased summary of the conference "Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade: Big Questions, Large Surveys, and Wide Fields," held 2-6 March 2015 in Santa Cruz de la Palma, Spain. I focus on four issues in this summary: (1) complexity in objects, physics, and instruments is driving the field of large-scale multi-object spectroscopic surveys; (2) statistics is important to drive conclusions, but inference is as or even more important; (3) multi-wavelength surveys are necessary, particularly for understanding galaxies and cosmology; and (4) a large number of new multi-object spectrographs at a wide variety of wavelengths are either already here or will rapidly be available. This conference shows that we are just learning how to get the most (astrophysics) out of these instruments

Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade: Big Questions, Large Surveys, and Wide Fields

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Stellar Kinematics and Metallicities in the Draco and Ursa Minor Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies from WHT/AF2-WYFFOS

We present preliminary results from our chemo-dynamical survey of two Milky Way dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies, Draco and Ursa Minor. The two galaxies have similar radial velocities and reside in close proximity in the outskirts of the Milky Way halo, yet exhibit noteworthy differences in their morphologies. We obtained spectroscopic data with AF2-WYFFOS on the WHT for several hundred red-giant-branch (RGB) candidates in each galaxy out to its tidal radius, from which we have identified approximately 100 velocity members in each system. Metallicities are determined for the individual RGB stars using the C

Stellar Archaeology with Gaia: The Galactic White Dwarf Population

Contains fulltext : 166023.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade: Big Questions, Large Surveys, and Wide Fields, Teatro Circo de Marte, Santa Cruz de La Palma Canary Islands, Spain 2–6 March 201