The WG1 workshop will be in-person in Cambridge, UK, and will be held September 11 - 13, 2023

Deadline for registration: 4 August 2023

Full details are available on the meeting webpage

Outline of the workshop

This MW-Gaia workshop focuses on the central halo of the Milky Way (R<10 kpc). Given its proximity and high stellar density, the inner halo is an ideal target for stellar surveys. However the central halo remains largely unstudied due to overwhelming contamination from the MW disc and high dust extinction. The inner accreted halo is predicted to host the earliest formed and the most primitive building blocks, but also to contain the strongest contribution from various in-situ components. While “unmixing” the inner halo would be ideal, relatively short dynamical timescales and strong perturbations from the Galactic bar make this incredibly difficult. In this workshop, we will discuss the advances that have been made towards characterising the inner halo; focusing on both the accreted and in-situ components, past, present and future tracers of structure and the influence of the Galactic bar in reshaping halo dynamics. We will also discuss what, as a community, we would like to focus on next, through synthesising the perspectives of simulators, theorists and observers.

Outline Programme

• Accreted halo
• In-situ halo
• Bar-halo interactions
• Central MW tracers