Star formation and early stellar evolution in the era of Gaia

ESA's Gaia astrometry satellite will shortly release its third astrometric catalogue, providing distances and motions for a billion stars. The Gaia-ESO survey is a massive spectroscopic programme carried out at ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) aiming to support Gaia and provide line-of-sight velocities and chemical abundances for some 100,000 stars. Professor Jeffries leads a group looking at ways of combining these datasets in stellar clusters to revolutionise our understanding of the timescales for star formation, early stellar evolution and stellar ages. A PhD student would use the Gaia and Gaia-ESO datasets to select clean samples of stars in stellar clusters and use these to test and calibrate stellar evolution models and benchmark age estimation techniques, with a focus on using the orthogonal constraints offered by photospheric chemical composition (particularly the abundance of lithium) as a means of examining the physics of stellar interiors. The project will involve working with large, world-class datasets using advanced statistical techniques, and collaborating with a network of European and US researchers.