| Abstract: The Milky Way (MW) plays an instrumental role in unravelling the evolutionary pathway of disk galaxies over cosmic time as it allows us a unique opportunity to carry out detailed photometric, spectroscopic, and dynamical studies on an individual star-by-star basis, in a way that is impossible for external galaxies. The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has enabled us to carry out a detailed chemo-dynamical study for an unprecedented dataset (~ 33 million stars) of the MW. In this talk, I will broadly discuss how studying the chemo-dynamical structure, possibly shaped up by external and internal perturbing sources, can shed valuable insight on the overall galaxy evolution over cosmic time. I will further discuss how different chemo-dynamical structures in the MW can potentially be used as kinematic diagnostics to put stringent constraints on the properties of the bar and spirals in the Milky Way. Lastly, I will focus on the upcoming Gaia data release 4 (scheduled by the end of 2026), its potential to study the MW in further details, and the associated limitations in the study of the evolution and dynamics of the MW. |
