# A Multi-Band Catalog of 10978 Star Clusters, Associations and Candidates in the Milky Way

## TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive multi-band catalog of nearly 11,000 Galactic star clusters, associations, and candidates, combining data from multiple surveys over 20 years to facilitate future astrophysical research.

## Contribution

It provides a large, uniformly characterized catalog with over 7,700 newly identified objects, enhancing the resources available for studying Galactic star clusters and related objects.

## Key findings

- Catalog contains 10,978 entries including 6,060 embedded clusters.
- Approximately 3,200 objects have literature-based parameters.
- Discovery of 638 new star clusters and similar objects.

## Abstract

We present a catalog of Galactic star clusters, associations and candidates with 10978 entries. This multi-band catalog was constructed over 20 years, starting with visual inspections on the Digital Sky Survey and incremented with the 2MASS, WISE, VVV, Spitzer and Herschel surveys. Large and small catalogs, as well as papers on individual objects have been systematically cross-identified. The catalog provides Galactic and equatorial coordinates, angular diameters, and chronologically ordered designations, making it simple to assign discoveries, and verify how often the objects were cataloged by different authors, search methods and/or surveys. Detection in a single band is the minimum constraint to validate an entry. About 3200 objects have measured parameters in the literature. A fundamental contribution of the present study is to present additional $\approx7700$ objects for first analyses of nature, photometry, spectroscopy and structure. The present focus is not to compile or determine fundamental parameters, but to provide a catalog characterizing uniformly the entries. A major result is that now 4060 embedded clusters are catologed, a factor of $\approx2$ larger than open clusters. Besides cross-identifications in different references and wavelength domains, we also communicate the discovery of 638 star clusters and alike objects. The present general catalog provides previously studied objects and thousands of additional entries in a homogeneous way, a timely contribution to {\em Gaia} related works.