Abstract

The emergence of barred galaxies is a sensitive indicator of the conditions in the early Universe. Current cosmological simulations now routinely produce realistic barred galaxies but reproducing the precise distributions of morphology and properties remains challenging. One route to understanding how bars form and evolve is to look close to home at our own Galaxy’s bar. I will describe work on measuring the epoch of bar formation in the Milky Way using data from Gaia and a ground-based astrometric catalogue VVV /VIRAC from the VISTA telescope. I will describe how the bar formation can be dated by studying the star formation history in the Milky Way’s nuclear stellar disc, a central structure intimately related to the bar, and describe the broader implications of the derived bar formation epoch for the history of our Galaxy.