Understanding the formation of the Milky Way in the era of Gaia

¹ Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany
² Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany
³ Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany

Abstract

The main goal of Galactic Archaeology is to understand the formation and evolution of the basic Galactic components. This requires sophisticated chemo-dynamical modeling, where disk asymmetries (e.g., perturbations from the bar, spirals, and mergers) and non-equilibrium processes are taken into account self-consistently. Here we discuss the current status of Galactic chemo-dynamical modeling and focus on a recent hybrid technique, which helps circumvent traditional problems with chemical enrichment and star formation encountered in fully self-consistent cosmological simulations. We show that this model can account for a number of chemo-kinematic relations in the Milky Way, as discussed in previous works. In addition, we demonstrate that our model matches well the observed age-[α/Fe] relation and that blurring may be insufficient to explain the scatter in the age-metallicity relation.