Thursday

The Gaia satellite mission poses an unprecedented challenge to our capabilities in comparing Galaxy models with data. Aiming at sample sizes of about 1 billion stars, and a large possible parameter space, which would require hundreds of thousands of models, it will be impossible to accurately fit full N-body/hydrodynamical simulations to these data. I will discuss how we can transfer knowledge from suites of N-body simulations to analytical models, which are sufficiently fast to perform the data-model comparison, and will give some insight how we can construct these models from physically sound distribution functions. I will also discuss the results that our group has gathered so far on disc heating, radial migration and inside-out formation, how they impact galactic structure, and how already these simulations require dark matter haloes similar to what is expected/measured for the Milky Way.