Cosmo-chronology in our neighbourhood of stars and planets

Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay – U. of Warwick

The volume of space within 100 pc from the Sun contains the brightest specimens of almost all types of stars and planets, but surprisingly it remains poorly explored. The main reason is that volume samples are dominated by faint M dwarfs, white dwarfs and brown dwarfs or exoplanets, which were difficult to identify in the past. The spacecraft Gaia from the European Space Agency has provided, for the first time in 2018, a near complete census of stars and white dwarfs within 100 pc, but a full understanding of the local stellar population is still a major challenge. Our group at the University of Warwick is trying to improve our knowledge of the stellar formation history and stellar evolution within that volume. Our approach is based on future follow-up multi-object spectroscopic observations from 4MOST and WEAVE, as well as state-of-the-art 3D model atmospheres and a new generation of white dwarf evolution models. I will discuss in particular the recently completed spectroscopic sample of ~1000 white dwarfs in the local 40 pc volume.