A Gaia DR2 view of the open cluster population in the Milky Way

By T. Cantat-Gaudin, C. Jordi, Antonella Vallenari, A. Bragaglia, L. Balaguer-N'unez, C. Soubiran, D. Bossini, André Moitinho, Alfred Castro-Ginard, Alberto Krone-Martins and 3 more. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2018

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Context. Open clusters are convenient probes of the structure and history of the Galactic disk. They are also fundamental to stellar evolution studies. The second Gaia data release contains precise astrometry at the submilliarcsecond level and homogeneous photometry at the mmag level, that can be used to characterise a large number of clusters over the entire sky. Aims. In this study we aim to establish a list of members and derive mean parameters, in particular distances, for as many clusters as possible, making use of Gaia data alone. Methods. We compiled a list of thousands of known or putative clusters from the literature. We then applied an unsupervised membership assignment code, UPMASK, to the Gaia DR2 data contained within the fields of those clusters. Results. We obtained a list of members and cluster parameters for 1229 clusters. As expected, the youngest clusters are seen to be tightly distributed near the Galactic plane and to trace the spiral arms of the Milky Way, while older objects are more uniformly distributed, deviate further from the plane, and tend to be located at larger Galactocentric distances. Thanks to the quality of Gaia DR2 astrometry, the fully homogeneous parameters derived in this study are the most precise to date. Furthermore, we report on the serendipitous discovery of 60 new open clusters in the fields analysed during this study.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05e4b2ff3c75aeaa71723273e56a5ad3a101b647

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Citations in the corpus

Painting a portrait of the Galactic disc with its stellar clusters (2020, methodology): “…altitude of the Galactic mid-plane is known to vary with Galactocentric radius (sometimes called corrugation, see e.g. Gum et al. 1960; Lockman 1977; Spicker & Feitzinger 1986; Cantat-Gaudin et al. 2018b), which might be an additional reason why different samples yield slightly different values8.”
Age determination for 269 Gaia DR2 open clusters (2019, methodology): “Cantat-Gaudin et al. (2018c) has derived membership probability and parameters for 128 OCs, by combining 2MASS photometry (Skrutskie et al. 2006), Gaia First Data Release (DR1) TGAS parallaxes, and proper motions from either Gaia DR1 or UCAC4 data (Zacharias et al. 2012).”
Untangling the Galaxy. I. Local Structure and Star Formation History of the Milky Way (2019, methodology): “The CNN was trained on the cluster populations from Cantat-Gaudin et al. (2018), with the age and extinction labels from Kharchenko et al. (2013), with the combination of the Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE photometry which were obtained from the cross match tables (Marrese et al. 2019).”
Photo-astrometric distances, extinctions, and astrophysical parameters for Gaia DR2 stars brighter than G = 18 (2019, methodology): “16 only refers to astrometric membership; no photometry was used in the construction of the membership list of Cantat-Gaudin et al. (2018a).”
A Catalog of Newly Identified Star Clusters in Gaia DR2 (2019, methodology): “K13 is compiled by Kharchenko et al. (2013), and contains 3006 objects with 2MASS photometry; CG18+19 is a Gaia DR2-based catalog, which combines 1229 objects in Cantat-Gaudin et al. (2018) and 46 objects in Cantat-Gaudin et al. (2019).”
Clusters and mirages: cataloguing stellar aggregates in the Milky Way (2019, methodology): “The non-physicality of NGC 6994 was recently confirmed again by Kos et al. (2018) and Cantat-Gaudin et al. (2018b) on the basis of additional radial velocities and Gaia DR2 astrometry and no doubt should remain that M 73/NGC 6994 is an asterism.”