MW-Gaia Legacy: Revealing the Milky Way with Gaia

Monday, 29 April, 2024

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During the four years of the MWGaia COST Action (2019-2023) “Revealing the Milky Way with Gaia” has provided European leadership in understanding the Galaxy, its stars and planets, enhanced the potential of the community in its scientific exploitation of the observations of more than a billion stars with the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, and paved the development of the next steps in astrometry and space astrometry missions.

This Action brought together key stakeholders from across Europe, leveraging expertise, and developing new techniques to fully maximise the scientific returns from Gaia’s rich and complex data.

Five key challenges were addressed: The Milky Way as a Galaxy, The Life and Death of Stars; Planetary Systems Near and Far; Gaia Fundamentals: Space and Time; and Astrometry Innovation Challenge – towards sub-μas astrometry. COST enabled the vital Action activities, supporting exchanges, training and meetings.

This Action leaves a significant legacy, has created a dynamic and vibrant network of researchers with expertise in the study of the Milky Way, its constituents and the art of Astrometry. Participation has been inclusive, with researchers accessing the Network from across Europe, irrespective of their gender or location.

COST Action Impact Map

This COST Action commenced 14 Mar 2019 and completed 13 Sep 2023. During those years there has been 17 workshops (around 4 per year), four schools (one annually), 33 Short-Term Scientific Missions (STSMs), and three Inclusiveness Target Country (ITC) Conference Grants to support PhD students and Early Career Researcher from participating ITCs to international conferences in the thematic domain of the Action. Moreover, as the pandemic shocked Europe, inside the Action we developed five Virtual Mobility grants devoted to strengthening the MW-Gaia networks by allowing individual participants to foster collaboration, exchange knowledge, learn new techniques, etc., performing activities that do not necessarily require in-person presence.

The 17 workshops counted with the participation of 1819 people from over 70 countries. Participants from DE and ES took part in all 17 workshops, while FR, IT and UK in 16 of them. NL, US, PT, RS, IN, PO, GR, CH in 10 or more workshops. The highest total number of participants per country was ES, followed by IT, PT, UK, DR and FR, all over 100.
The first 4 workshop 2019-2020 were in person, then the following 3 in 2020-2021 were online due to the pandemic and from there on they all were hybrid, making them more sustainable, accessible and diverse.

From the 1819 participants of all 17 workshops, a 38% were women. Dividing by WGs:

  • WG1: The Milky Way as a Galaxy, organised 6 workshops with a 31% of women.
  • WG2: The Life and Death of Stars, organised 7 workshops with a 39% of women.
  • WG3: Planetary Systems Near and Far, organised 4 workshops with a 37% of women.
  • WG4: Gaia Fundamentals: Space and Time, organised 6 workshops with a 33% of women.
  • WG5: Impact, Inclusiveness and Outreach, organised 3 workshops with a 50% of women, reaching full parity.

In any case all workshops were over the 30% of women participation that is standard in the field (27.3%).

A list of all the workshops is:

There were four schools:

  • WG1-Barcelona-GP1-Jan20 Galaxy modelling and High performance computing models
  • WG2-Padova-GP2 Stellar spectroscopy with Gaia and astrophysical parameterization of stars: 21-23 Sep 2021
  • WG3-Geneva-GP3 Exoplanets and astro-statistical analysis techniques: 12-16 Sep 2022
  • WG5-Vilnius-GP4 Better Inclusion, Better Science, Building Impact in MW-GAIA: 3-5 July 2023

The 4 schools counted with the participation of 422 people from over 70 countries. Participants from ES, IT and DE took part in all 4 schools. The highest total number of participants per country was ES, followed by IT, IN, CN, DE, BR and USA, all over 15.

The first school, Barcelona 2020, and third, Geneva 2022, were in person with 38 and 19 participants respectively, then Padova 2021 was online due to the pandemic with 301 participants, and the last one, Vilnius 2023 was hybrid with 64 participants.

There were 38 STSM that occurred distributed in the four periods GP1:18 visits, GP2:5 (some were cancelled due to the pandemic), GP3:6 and GP4:9 visits.

The list of all the 38 STSM is:

From the 38, 33 were definitely happening.

There were four Virtual Mobility (VM) grants to four projects:

The countries of origin were 12, and are led by Spain, followed mainly by United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Germany and Italy.

Regarding the 9 hosts countries, again Spain has the biggest participation followed by France, United Kingdom, Italy and others.

TAGS:

COST Action,Legacy,MW Gaia