Discovery of a young stellar "snake" with two dissolving cores in the solar neighborhood

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a young, snake-like stellar structure in the solar neighborhood, characterized by two dissolving cores, which provides new insights into local star formation and the structure of the Vela OB2 complex.

Contribution

The discovery of a young, primordial stellar 'snake' structure with unique morphology and phase space properties, expanding understanding of local star formation regions.

Findings

The 'snake' is about 30-40 Myr old and 310 pc away.

It contains thousands of stars with a total mass over 2000 solar masses.

It likely represents a primordial structure related to the Vela OB2 association.

Abstract

We report the discovery of a young (only 30-40\,Myr) snake-like structure (dubbed a stellar "snake") in the solar neighborhood from {\it Gaia} DR2. The average distance of this structure is about 310\,pc from us. Both the length and width are over 200\,pc, but the thickness is only about 80\,pc. The "snake" has one tail and two dissolving cores, which can be clearly distinguished in the 6D phase space. The whole structure includes thousands of members with a total mass of larger than 2000\,$M_{\odot}$ in an uniform population. The population is so young that it can not be well explained with the classical theory of tidal tails. We therefore suspect that the "snake" is hierarchically primordial, rather than the result of dynamically tidal stripping, even if the "snake" is probably expanding. The coherent 5D phase information and the ages suggest that the "snake" was probably born in the same environment as the filamentary structure of Beccari et al.(2020). If so, the "snake" could extend the sky region of the Vela OB2 association by a factor of $\sim 2$, and supplement the census of its coeval structures. This finding is useful to understand the history of the formation and evolution of the Vela OB2 complex. The age of the "snake" well matches with that of the Gould Belt. In the sky region of our interest, we detect one new open cluster, which is named as Tian 1 in this work.