207 New Open Star Clusters within 1 kpc from Gaia Data Release 2

TL;DR

This study uses Gaia DR2 data to identify and characterize 207 new open star clusters within 1 kpc of the Sun, expanding the known catalog of nearby stellar groupings.

Contribution

It presents a new survey method combining astrometric and photometric data to discover 207 previously unknown open clusters near the Sun.

Findings

Identified 655 cluster candidates through visual inspection.

Cross-matched to confirm 207 new open clusters.

Most new clusters are young to intermediate age with fewer than 50 members.

Abstract

We conducted a survey of open clusters within 1 kpc from the Sun using the astrometric and photometric data of the Gaia Data Release 2. We found 655 cluster candidates by visual inspection of the stellar distributions in proper motion space and spatial distributions in l-b space. All of the 655 cluster candidates have a well defined main-sequence except for two candidates if we consider that the main sequence of very young clusters is somewhat broad due to differential extinction. Cross-matching of our 653 open clusters with known open clusters in various catalogs resulted in 207 new open clusters. We present the physical properties of the newly discovered open clusters. The majority of the newly discovered open clusters are of young to intermediate age and have less than ~50 member stars.