Local Stellar Populations & the Milky Way

The solar neighbourhood provides one of the most detailed laboratories for Galactic archaeology. Nearby stars preserve information about the formation, structure, and star-formation history of the Milky Way, while precise astrometry and photometry from Gaia make it possible to connect these populations directly to physical models of our Galaxy.

My interest in stellar populations and Galactic evolution grew out of my research at Heidelberg University, combining population synthesis, nearby-star catalogues, and white-dwarf studies to investigate the history of the Milky Way.

Population synthesis and Galactic archaeology

During my Master’s research, I worked on the JJ model, a semi-analytic chemo-dynamical model of the Galactic disc. This work extended the model’s population synthesis to white dwarfs and compared the predicted local population with Gaia observations.

This research has since developed into CALOMERA (Sysoliatina & Vani 2026), a successor to the JJ framework that extends population synthesis across a broader range of stellar populations and evolutionary stages, including main-sequence stars, white dwarfs, and brown dwarfs. By combining these complementary populations, CALOMERA aims to place stronger constraints on the star-formation and evolutionary history of the Milky Way. The framework can also be used to estimate contamination by brown dwarfs in deep JWST fields.

Illustration of the CALOMERA Milky Way population-synthesis framework.

The nearby stellar census

The Catalogue of Nearby Stars provides a complementary observational view of the solar neighbourhood. Golovin et al. 2023 in CNS5 updated the census of stars and brown dwarfs within 25 pc using Gaia and complementary data, with improved completeness, validation, and source characterisation.

Follow-up work, Golovin et al. 2024, identified previously missed nearby white dwarfs and improved the local white-dwarf census. The ongoing sixth iteration, Golovin et al. 2026 i.e. CNS6, extends the catalogue further by incorporating more comprehensive physical properties and updated characterisation of nearby objects.

Explore the solar neighbourhood

Interactive explorer of our stellar neighbourhood based on Golovin et al. 2023

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Connecting models and observations

Together, population synthesis and the nearby stellar census provide complementary ways to reconstruct the Milky Way’s history. The models connect assumptions about star formation, stellar evolution, and Galactic structure to observable stellar populations, while volume-limited catalogues provide the data needed to test those predictions.

This combination provides a framework for Galactic archaeology across main-sequence stars, white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and the local stellar population as a whole.