Pearls on a String: Numerous Stellar Clusters Strung along the Same Orbit

TL;DR

This study reveals that stellar clusters and associations often form at distinct orbital phases along the same orbit, creating a 'pearls on a string' pattern that reflects the filamentary structure of the interstellar medium.

Contribution

It quantitatively demonstrates the frequent occurrence of multiple stellar overdensities along individual orbits in phase space, a novel insight into star formation patterns.

Findings

Numerous orbital phase overdensities exist along the same orbit.

50% of orbit patches contain at least 8 additional pearls.

Compared to mock catalogs, real data shows significantly more pearls.

Abstract

Stars originate from the dense interstellar medium, which exhibits filamentary structure to scales of $\sim 1$ kpc in galaxies like our Milky Way. We explore quantitatively how much resulting large-scale correlation there is among different stellar clusters and associations in \emph{orbit phase space}, characterized here by actions and angles. As a starting point, we identified 55 prominent stellar overdensities in the 6D space of orbit (actions) and orbital phase (angles), among the $\sim$ 2.8 million stars with radial velocities from Gaia EDR3 and $d \leq 800$ pc. We then explored the orbital \emph{phase} distribution of all sample stars in the same \emph{orbit} patch as any one of these 55 overdensities. We find that very commonly numerous other distinct orbital phase overdensities exist along these same orbits, like pearls on a string. These `pearls' range from known stellar clusters to loose, unrecognized associations. Among orbit patches defined by one initial orbit-phase overdensity 50\% contain at least 8 additional orbital-phase pearls of 10 cataloged members; 20\% of them contain 20 additional pearls. This is in contrast to matching orbit patches sampled from a smooth mock catalog, or offset nearby orbit patches, where there are only 2 (or 5, respectively) comparable pearls. Our findings quantify for the first time how common it is for star clusters and associations to form at distinct orbital phases of nearly the same orbit. This may eventually offer a new way to probe the 6D orbit structure of the filamentary interstellar medium.