The Galactic Centre is a key environment for understanding how the Milky Way formed and evolved, and for studying the inner regions of spiral galaxies. However, extreme extinction and stellar crowding make Gaia effectively blind to its central parsecs. Near-infrared surveys such as GALACTICNUCLEUS and VVVX-Galcen are revealing the stellar populations there, but their 3D structure and formation...
The Milky Way (MW) bar hosts a prominent boxy/peanut (B/P) structure, recognised since the COBE mission. Simulations of bar evolution that include ongoing star formation show that the B/P morphology varies across stellar populations due to kinematic fractionation, meaning that stars of different ages originate in different kinematical conditions of the bar/disc and therefore settle onto...
GaiaNIR will dramatically advance studies of the Clouds (LMC and SMC) by delivering two key improvements in astrometric precision and coverage. First, its extended time baseline will sharpen proper motions for the 15–20 million LMC and SMC stars already observed by Gaia. Second, its near-infrared sensitivity will enable the detection of large new stellar samples in heavily dust-obscured inner...
