The ongoing Gaia mission of ESA will provide an accurate spatial and kinematical information for a large fraction of stars on our side of the Galactic centre. Interstellar extinction and line absorption studies toward a large number of stars at different distances and directions can give a 3-dimensional distribution map of interstellar absorbers, and thus reach a similar level or spatial and kinematic perfection. Specifically, under certain morphologies (e.g. geometrically thin absorption curtains and sheets) one can infer a complete velocity vector from its radial velocity component and so obtain a dynamical information comparable to stars. For that, observations of large number of stars at different distances are needed to determine where (along the line of sight) are the absorption pockets. Therefore, techniques to measure interstellar absorptions towards (abundant) cool stars are needed. A complex mix of colliding absorption clouds in found in the Galactic plane. Thus, one would wish to start with deep observations to detect the weak, but much more simple interstellar absorptions at high Galactic latitudes. Finally, interstellar atomic line absorption studies toward cool stars in the optical are largely limited to Sodium and Potassium doublets, not covered by many surveys, including Gaia. Diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) can be important, as their measurement can give the same type of information as interstellar atomic absorption lines. A combination of both may also point to differences in dynamics of different components of the interstellar medium. In particular, Gaia spectra can be used to study the DIB at 8620 Å, and build 3-dimensional absorption maps, as already demonstrated by RAVE. Additionally, several the survey ground-based surveys (e.g APOGEE in the infrared, Gaia-ESO and Galah) that are pursuing this approach will be discussed in this contribution. The use of this new information can change our understanding in many areas (e.g. determination of membership of stars in clusters, studies of a few Myr old supernova remnants and investigations of Galactic fountains). The invited lecture is documented in http://eas.unige.ch/EWASS2015/session.jsp?id=Sp20 .
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 61913760-min lecture at Australian Astronomical Observatory in Sydney on September 9 2015 and ay the Mt. Stromlo observatory of the Australian national university in Canberra on September 11 2015. The latter is documented at http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/seminars/past.php , pdf of the slides is accessible there, as well as at fiz.fmf.uni-lj.si/zwitter/conferences.html. The contents is an upgrade from the invited lecture described under item 1 above.
B.05 Guest lecturer at an institute/university
COBISS.SI-ID: 618625The 3rd Gaia-ESO survey science meeting took place in Vilnius from the 1st to the 4th of December 2015 (http://www.astrospectroscopy.tfai.vu.lt/ges2015/). Former meetings of the same series were held in Porto and Florence, while the preparatory meeting of the collaboration took place in Nice. In Vilnius TZ contributed as a co-leader of the working group 14 (peculiar objects), together with Sophie van Eck from Bruxelles. Other members of this project were presenting 5 contributions to this conference, which were well accepted. In particular, there were the following contributed talks (documented at http://www.astrospectroscopy.tfai.vu.lt/ges2015/index.php/programme): (1) M. Žerjal: Chromospherically active field stars, (2) J. Kos: Diffuse Interstellar Bands: The Progress and Importance of the Gaia-ESO Survey, (3) G. Traven: Exploring peculiar morphologies using t-SNE reduction of spectral information. There were also two posters (documented at http://www.astrospectroscopy.tfai.vu.lt/ges2015/index.php/programme-2): (1) A. Kochoska: The Broadening Function (BF) approach as a tool in the search for binaries among peculiar stars with tSNE, (2) D. Birko: Single lined spectroscopic binary stars in the Gaia-ESO Survey.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference