Pith. sign in

REVIEW

Membership lists for 431 open clusters in Gaia DR2 using extreme deconvolution gaussian mixture models

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2108.02783 v1 pith:RYCLQ35W submitted 2021-08-05 astro-ph.GA

Membership lists for 431 open clusters in Gaia DR2 using extreme deconvolution gaussian mixture models

classification astro-ph.GA
keywords openclusterclustersdeconvolutionextrememembershipgaiaknown
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Open clusters are groups of stars that form at the same time, making them an ideal laboratory to test theories of star formation, stellar evolution, and dynamics in the Milky Way disk. However, the utility of an open cluster can be limited by the accuracy and completeness of its known members. Here, we employ a "top-down" technique, {\it extreme deconvolution gaussian mixture models} (XDGMM), to extract and evaluate known open clusters from Gaia DR2 by fitting the distribution of stellar parallax and proper motion along a line-of-sight. Extreme deconvolution techniques can recover the intrinsic distribution of astrometric quantities, accounting for the full covariance matrix of the errors; this allows open cluster members to be identified even when presented with relatively uncertain measurement data. To date, open cluster studies have only applied extreme deconvolution to specialized searches for individual systems. We use XDGMM to characterize the open clusters reported by Ahumada et al. 2007 and are able to recover 420 of the 426 open clusters therein (98.1\%). Our membership list contains the overwhelming majority ($>95\%$) of previously known cluster members. We also identify a new, significant, and relatively faint cluster member population and validate their membership status using Gaia eDR3. We report the fortuitous discovery of 11 new open cluster candidates within the lines of sight we analyzed. We present our technique, its advantages and challenges, as well as publish our membership lists and updated cluster parameters.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.