PhD position Placing the Local Group in a cosmological context

Understanding how our Milky Way and its nearest neighbors formed is a central theme of modern Astrophysics, and one for which our group at the University of Groningen has worldwide recognition. The field of Galactic Archaeology uses the detailed fossil record of stars in our Galaxy, M31 and their satellites to reconstruct this history. It is currently undergoing a revolution thanks to the Gaia satellite and to massive spectroscopic surveys. However, we are currently missing sufficiently realistic cosmological simulations to fully interpret and exploit these datasets. Thanks to a recent development by our international team, producing such very realistic analogues of the Milky Way and M31 is within reach. Such high-resolution cosmological simulations of the evolution of gas, stars and dark matter with state-of-the-art codes, will allow us to quantitatively link the observed spatial, dynamical, and chemical structure of the Milky Way and M31 to their assembly history and environment and provide new tests of the standard cosmological model.