How Gaia sheds light on the Milky Way star cluster population

TL;DR

Gaia's precise astrometric data has revolutionized the discovery, characterization, and understanding of Milky Way star clusters, especially open clusters in the Galactic disc, enhancing knowledge of their distribution, structure, and evolution.

Contribution

This review summarizes recent advances in Gaia-based detection, age estimation, and dynamical studies of Milky Way star clusters, highlighting new insights into their properties and evolution.

Findings

Gaia data has vastly improved cluster detection and characterization.

Recent techniques enable better age estimation of clusters.

Studies reveal detailed dynamical evolution of star clusters.

Abstract

Star clusters are among the first celestial objects catalogued by early astronomers. As simple and coeval populations, their study has been instrumental in charting the properties of the Milky Way and providing insight into stellar evolution through the 20th century. Clusters were traditionally spotted as local stellar overdensities in the plane of the sky. In recent decades, for a limited number of nearby clusters, it became possible to identify cluster members through their clustering in proper motion space. With its astrometric data of unprecedented precision, the Gaia mission has completely revolutionised our ability to discover and characterise Milky Way star clusters, to map their large-scale distribution, and to investigate their internal structure. In this review we focus on the population of open clusters, residing in the Galactic disc. We summarise the current state of the Gaia-updated cluster census and studies of young clusters and associations. We discuss recent developments in techniques for cluster detection and age estimation. We also review results enabled by Gaia data concerning the dynamical evolution of gravitationally bound clusters and their stellar inventory.