Abstract

The ESA Gaia mission has been mapping the Milky Way since 2014. It will provide high precision parallaxes and hence distances to some 2 billion stars in our Milky Way. With it’s second data release (Gaia DR2 ), Gaia is already having a transformational impact on our understanding of the Milky Way and its constituent components. Recent results using Gaia DR2 have ranged from new results on the Hubble constant, to the discovery of recent dwarf galaxy mergers into the Milky Way, to crystallized white dwarf stars.

Gaia data will also enable a powerful tool in the discovery and characterisation of exo-planets and their host stars. In this presentation, the role of Gaia will be discussed, and how together with the upcoming ESA PLATO Mission, we will be able to discover Earth like exo-planets in the habitable zone around, crucially, solar type stars.

The talk will be at the usual location of the Wolfson lecture theatre in the Department of Chemistry, shown on the map here: https://map.cam.ac.uk/#52.197868,0.125487,19,52.197816,0.125093

Tickets are £2 or free for members. Annual membership (£7) and life membership (£12) can also be purchased at the event – cash or card. The talk will be followed by refreshments outside the lecture theatre.

This talk is part of the Cambridge University Astronomical Society (CUAS) series.