Gaia and the dynamics of the Galaxy
  Gaia is an ambitious ESA space mission which will provide photometric and
astrometric measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a kinematic
census of almost one billion stars in our Galaxy. These data will revolutionize
our understanding of the dynamics of the Milky Way, and our knowledge of its
detailed gravitational potential and mass distribution, including the putative
dark matter component and the non-axisymmetric features such as spiral arms.
The Gaia mission will help to answer various currently unsettled questions by
using kinematic information on both disk and halo stellar populations. Among
many others: what does the rotation curve of the outer Galaxy look like? How
far from axisymmetry and equilibrium is the Galaxy? What are the respective
roles of hierarchical formation and secular evolution in shaping the Galaxy and
its various components? Are the properties of the Galaxy in accordance with
expectations from the standard model of cosmology?
