So many emotions all at once!!! On December 6, I became a Doctor in Astrophysics and I am so very grateful to everyone who has been a part of this journey since the 11-year-old me wanted to get a PhD in 'astro-stuff'.
Here is a digital copy of my thesis: doi.org/10.33612/dis...

Celebrating Gaia's 10th birthday with some cake 😍 loved making the Milky Way map edible❤️✨ #ESAGaia

Now we have a catalogue of 1000 VMP stars all-sky that are so bright (G<13) ideal for high-res follow-up. This increases literature estimates by a factor of 3. It is incredible that I got to learn the power of archival data from big surveys to do science useful for the community

We also compare our metallicities to other works that analyse RVS spectra like the amazing GSP-Spec pipeline by the Gaia consortium and improvement in the VMP end by Matsuno+ 22. We have good agreement if used with their quality cuts, but this is only a small overlap (~25%)

We validate our inferred metallicities with existing spectroscopic surveys (APOGEE and GALAH) and dedicated high-resolution follow-up of VMP stars to learn the purity and precision of our analysis. Things look good, so the catalogue is good to go!

We utilize an MCMC pipeline to fit equivalent widths to all three Calcium Triplet lines i.e., 850.04 nm, 854.44 nm and 866.45 nm at the same time. We go from equivalent widths to metallicities using the Carrera+ 13 relation. It was cool to analyse spectra from the space!!

We use publicly available Gaia RVS spectra (of ~1 million sources) and pre-select potential VMP stars from photometric (or equivalent) metallicities from Pristine DR1 and Pristine Gaia-synthetic catalogues from Martin, Starkenburg+ 23 and Table 2 giants from Andrae+ 23.