The Geneva-Copenhagen survey of the Solar neighbourhood: Ages, metallicities, and kinematic properties of 14,000 F and G dwarfs

We present and discuss new determinations of metallicity, rotation, age, kinematics, and Galactic orbits for a complete, magnitude-limited, and kinematically unbiased sample of 16,682 nearby F and G dwarf stars. Our 63,000 new, accurate radial-velocity observations for nearly 13,500 stars allow identification of most of the binary stars in the sample and, together with published data complete the kinematic information for 14,139 stars. A major effort has been devoted to the determination of new isochrone ages for all stars for which this is possible. Particular attention has been given to a realistic treatment of statistical biases and error estimates, as standard techniques tend to underestimate these effects and introduce spurious features in the age distributions. We demonstrate, however, how strong observational and theoretical biases cause the distribution of the observed ages to be very different from that of the true age distribution of the sample. Our first results confirm the lack of metal-poor G dwarfs relative to closed-box model predictions (the ``G dwarf problem''), the existence of radial metallicity gradients in the disk, the small change in mean metallicity of the thin disk since its formation and the substantial scatter in metallicity at all ages, and the continuing kinematic heating of the thin disk with an efficiency consistent with that expected for a combination of spiral arms and giant molecular clouds. Distinct features in the distribution of the V component of the space motion are extended in age and metallicity, corresponding to the effects of stochastic spiral waves rather than classical moving groups, and may complicate the identification of thick-disk stars from kinematic criteria. (abridged)