SPACE ASTROMETRY FOR ASTROPHYSICS

The offered course is designed for PhD students, post-doctoral fellows and young researchers interested in understanding the scientific construction of the Gaia catalogue and its current and future scientific potential, in synergy with the large spectro-photometric surveys. With ESA’s Gaia mission the framework of relativistic astrometry is required to translate photons to astrometric quantities, thus the fields of “Fundamental Astronomy” and “Fundamental Physics” are unified under the perspective of a consistent use of the theory of General Relativity. General topics include fundamental astronomy and stellar surveys, global and differential relativistic astrometry, chemo-kinematics of the Milky Way and Galactic Archeology, and Galactic dynamics. Some specific topics include, stellar streams in the halo, stellar clusters, non-equilibrium dynamics in the disk of the Milky Way, inference of physical parameters and, one century after the famous experiment on the light deflection by the Sun in 1919, astrometric lensing.