New Open Clusters Found by Manual Mining of Data in Gaia DR2

TL;DR

This study reports the discovery and confirmation of 20 new open clusters using Gaia DR2 data, employing visual inspection and proper motion analysis, revealing their physical properties and challenging previous completeness claims.

Contribution

The paper introduces a manual mining approach to identify new open clusters in Gaia DR2 data, not present in existing catalogs, and confirms their physical nature through multiple data analyses.

Findings

20 new open clusters confirmed with Gaia DR2 data

Clusters exhibit proper motion clumps and main sequences in CMDs

Some clusters form a double system indicating common origin

Abstract

The physical nature of a series of 20 new open clusters is confirmed employing existing data on putative star members, mainly from second Gaia Data Release (DR2). The clusters were discovered as overdensities of stars by visual inspection of either photographic DSS plates or proper motion plots of random source fields. The reported objects are not present in the most comprehensive or recent catalogs of stellar clusters and associations. For all of them, clumps of comoving stars are revealed in the proper motion space. The parallaxes of the clumped stars are compatible with the real existence of open clusters over narrow ranges of distances. Surface density calculations, free of most noise from non-member sources, allow in some cases differentiating a cluster core and an extended cluster corona. Color-magnitude diagrams generally show a definite main sequence that allows the confirmation of the physical existence of the clusters and some of their characteristics. Two of the new clusters seem to form a double system with a common origin. Several of the new clusters challenge the claim of near completeness of the known OC population in the distance range from 1.0 to 1.8 kpc of the Sun (Kharchenko et al. 2013).