# The birth of the Milky Way as uncovered by accurate stellar ages with Gaia

## TL;DR

This study uses Gaia data to accurately determine stellar ages, revealing the timeline of the Milky Way's formation, including the major accretion event of Gaia-Enceladus, and clarifying the origins of its halo and thick disk.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel application of colour-magnitude diagram fitting with Gaia data to derive stellar ages, clarifying the Galaxy's early formation history.

## Key findings

- Halo stars are older than thick disk stars.
- The halo's age cut at 10 Gyr marks the Gaia-Enceladus merger.
- The red sequence represents the first stars in the Milky Way progenitor.

## Abstract

Knowledge of ages for stars formed over a galaxy's lifetime is fundamental to understand its formation and evolution. However, stellar ages are difficult to obtain since they cannot be measured from observations, being comparison with stellar models (Soderblom 2010) required. Alternatively, age distributions can be derived applying the robust technique of colour-magnitude diagram fitting (Gallart et al. 2005), till now mainly employed to study nearby galaxies. The new distances to individual Milky Way stars from the Gaia mission (Brown et al. 2018) have allowed us to use this technique to derive ages from a thick disk colour-magnitude diagram, and from the enigmatic, two-sequenced colour-magnitude diagram of the kinematically hot local halo (Babusiaux et al. 2018), which blue-sequence has been linked to a major accretion event (Haywood et al. 2018, Helmi et al. 2018). Because accurate ages were lacking, the time of the merger and its role on our Galaxy's early evolution remained unclear. We show that the stars in both halo sequences share identical age distributions, and are older than the bulk of thick disc stars. The sharp halo age cut 10 Gyr ago can be identified with the accretion of Gaia-Enceladus. Along with state-of-the-art cosmological simulations of galaxy formation (Brook et al. 2012), these robust ages allow us to order the early sequence of events that shaped our Galaxy, identifying the red-sequence as the first stars formed within the Milky Way progenitor which, because of their kinematics, can be described as its long sought in-situ halo.