Gaia DR1 completeness within 250 pc and star formation history of the Solar neighbourhood

TL;DR

This study uses Gaia DR1 data to analyze the star formation history of the solar neighbourhood within 250 pc, revealing an enhanced past star formation rate and discussing future applications with upcoming Gaia data releases.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining Gaia DR1 data with photometry to derive the star formation history within 250 pc, improving understanding of local stellar populations.

Findings

Enhanced star formation rate in the past 4 Gyr.

Results inconsistent with an exponentially decreasing SFR.

Method can be extended to larger distances with future Gaia data.

Abstract

Taking advantage of the Gaia DR1, we combined TGAS parallaxes with the Tycho-2 and APASS photometry to calculate the star formation history (SFH) of the solar neighbourhood within 250 pc using the colour-magnitude diagram fitting technique. Our dynamically-evolved SFH is in excellent agreement with that calculated from the Hipparcos catalogue within 80 pc of the Sun, showing an enhanced star formation rate (SFR) in the past ~4 Gyr. We then correct the SFR for the disc thickening with age to obtain a SFR that is representative of the whole solar cylinder, and show that even with an extreme correction our results are not consistent with an exponentially decreasing SFR as found by recent studies. Finally, we discuss how this technique can be applied out to ~5 kpc thanks to the next Gaia data releases, which will allow us to quantify the SFH of the thin disc, thick disc and halo in situ.