Speaker
Description
We present CeVeSo-GC, a project aimed at building a homogeneous census of FGKM and ultracool stars out to 500 pc in the direction of the Galactic Center — a region still poorly characterized due to crowding and extinction.
The catalog is constructed by combining Gaia DR3 optical astrometry with deep VVVX near-infrared photometry, enabling distance estimation (parallactic or photometric), temperature and spectral-type determination, and population classification. We will identify key scientific subsets including young stars, metal-poor subdwarfs, ultracool dwarfs, potential exoplanet hosts, and unresolved binaries. ML techniques will be used to evaluate contamination and completeness, and spectroscopic/high-resolution imaging follow-up is foreseen to refine parameters and multiplicity assessments.
We will discuss how Gaia NIR will dramatically extend this work by improving parallaxes and proper motions, increasing completeness for cool and faint objects, and mitigating extinction toward the bulge. This mission will enable a more complete and precise characterization of the Solar Neighborhood toward the Galactic Center, opening new avenues for Galactic structure, stellar evolution, chemical-abundance studies, and exoplanet searches around M dwarfs.
