Assessing membership projection errors in star forming regions

TL;DR

This study investigates how uncertainties in Gaia DR2 parallax distances cause systematic errors in identifying stellar sub-clusters in star forming regions, affecting their estimated properties and dynamical mass calculations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the significant bias introduced by projection effects and distance uncertainties in sub-cluster identification using MST algorithms, highlighting the need for improved methods.

Findings

Projection-based group masses are underestimated by up to 50-100%.

Distance uncertainties significantly bias sub-cluster property estimates.

Incompleteness exacerbates the systematic bias in cluster identification.

Abstract

Young stellar clusters harbour complex spatial structures emerging from the star formation process. Identifying stellar over-densities is a key step to constrain better how these structures are formed. The high accuracy of distances derived from Gaia DR2 parallaxes yet do not allow to locate with certainty individual stars within clusters of size $\approx 1\, \rm{pc}$. In this work, we explore how such uncertainty in distance estimates can lead to the misidentification of membership of sub-clusters selected by the minimum spanning tree (MST) algorithm. Our goal is to assess how this impacts their estimated properties. Using N-body simulations, we build Gravity-Driven Fragmentation (GDF) models that reproduce self-consistently the early stellar configurations of a star forming region. Stellar groups are then identified both in 3- and 2-dimensions by the MST algorithm, representing respectively an ideal and an inaccurate identification. We compare the properties derived of these resulting groups, to assess the systematic bias introduced by projection and incompleteness. We show that in such fragmented configurations, the dynamical mass of groups identified in projection is systematically underestimated compared to those of groups identified in 3D. This systematic error is statistically of $50\%$ for more than half of the groups and reach $100\%$ in a quarter of them. Adding incompleteness further increases this bias. These results challenge our ability to identify accurately sub-clusters in most nearby star forming regions where distance estimate uncertainties are comparable to the size of the region. New clump finding methods have to tackle this issue in order to define better the dynamical state of these substructures.