Death of a cluster: the destruction of M67 as seen by the SDSS
James R. A. Davenport (1), Eric L. Sandquist (2) ((1) University of, Washington, (2) San Diego State University)

TL;DR
This study maps the spatial and dynamical structure of the old open cluster M67 using SDSS data, revealing an extended halo, a larger core radius, and evidence of mass segregation influenced by the galactic tidal field.
Contribution
It introduces a matched filter algorithm applied to SDSS and 2MASS data to analyze M67's structure, binary fraction, and mass segregation, providing new insights into its spatial extent and stellar distribution.
Findings
Extended halo of M67 up to 60' radius
Core radius measured at 8.24 arcminutes, larger than previous estimates
Binary fraction in M67 is at least 45%
Abstract
We probe the spatial and dynamical structure of the old open cluster M67 using photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's sixth data release. Making use of an optimal contrast, or matched filter, algorithm, we map the distribution of high probability members of M67. We find an extended and elongated halo of likely members to a radius of nearly 60'. Our measured core radius of Rcore = 8.'24+/-0.'60 is somewhat larger than that of previous estimates. We attribute the larger core radius measurement to the SDSS probing lower mass main sequence stars than has been done before for similar studies of M67, and the exclusion of post main sequence M67 members in the SDSS sample. We estimate the number of M67 members in our SDSS sample to be 1385+/-67 stars. A lower limit on the binary fraction in M67 is measured to be 45%. A higher fraction of binary stars is measured in the core as…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
