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The Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey will obtain high quality spectroscopy of some 100,000 Milky Way stars, in the field and in open clusters, down to magnitude 19, systematically covering

images/articleimg/Selection_003.png major components of the Milky Way. This survey will provide the first homogeneous overview of the distributions of kinematics and chemical element abundances in the Galaxy.

The Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey employs the VLT FLAMES instrument (both GIRAFFE and UVES) for high quality spectroscopy of some 100,000 stars in the Milky Way. This survey has beenawarded 300-nights over the coming five years, with the first data being taken in December 2011.
 
Element abundance distribution functions of the Milky Way Bulge, the thick Disc, the thin Disc, and the Halo stellar components, as well as a very significant sample of 100 open clusters, covering all accessible cluster ages and stellar masses. This alone will revolutionise knowledge of Galactic and stellar evolution. When combined with precision astrometry, delivering accurate distances, 3D spatial distributions, 3D space motions, and improved astrophysical parameters for each star, the survey will quantify the formation history and evolution of young, mature and ancient Galactic populations. The precision astrometry will be provided by the Gaia “Galactic census”, with the first astrometric data release likely to occur in 2016, in time for the full
analysis of the complete Gaia-ESO Survey data.

The Vilnius node of the survey adds significant input in the survey results:

We are one of the nodes, that provides main atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances for stars observed using UVES spectrograph. Specifically we are the only node to derive carbon and nitrogen abundances form molecular lines.

Together with Nice node we derive abundances from GIRAFFE spectra. Our common work is 1/3 of the input for GIRAFFE abundance analysis. We are mostly interested in Galactic abundance gradients.


Members of Vilnius group:

Gražina Tautvaišienė - group leader

Edita Stonkutė

Renata Ženovienė

Eduardas Puzeras

Šarūnas Mikolaitis

Jurij Chornij

Arnas Drazdauskas


What we achieved? Our recent achievements are already in a number of Gaia-ESO papers: