Dates: January 11 to 15 2027
Location: Eugenides Foundation, Athens Greece
Registration opens: June 15 2026
Overview
This conference celebrates the achievements of the MWGaiaDN Doctoral Network, which features PhD projects focused on the science that can be extracted from Gaia DR3 and Gaia DR4. Topics covered are the Milky Way as a galaxy, stars and planets, and Active Galactic Nuclei in the context of reference frames. MWGaiaDN projects also look towards the future, by researching the challenges of sub-microarcsecond astrometry and investigating the technical challenges that will have to be overcome to realize the potential follow-up mission to Gaia, GaiaNIR
The timing of this conference, just after the release of Gaia DR4, allows for a look back at the science results achieved with Gaia DR3 and to look ahead at the grand challenges that Gaia DR4 and DR5 offer that the scientific community can address through collaborative projects.
Looking further ahead, the next step will be to map the regions of the Milky Way and the universe inaccessible by Gaia, which requires a deeper survey able to penetrate the dust to unveil the hidden regions. Future astrometry missions in the infrared will be discussed, with JASMINE mapping the Milky Way’s nuclear region and GaiaNIR vastly expanding Gaia’s census of the Milky Way to a dense sampling of phase space over the full extent of the Milky Way’s disk. The latest mission updates will be presented and synergies with other missions and surveys will be explored.