The stellar initial mass function of nearby young moving groups

TL;DR

This study used Gaia DR3 data to identify and analyze the initial mass functions of 33 nearby young moving groups, revealing their similarity to the solar neighborhood IMF and supporting their origin as dispersed stellar clusters.

Contribution

Developed a novel algorithm to detect NYMGs using Gaia data and derived their IMFs, including 30 groups studied for the first time, confirming their consistency with known stellar populations.

Findings

Detected 4166 candidate members, including 2545 new candidates.

Estimated contamination rate from old field stars at 16-24%.

IMF parameters align with the IMF of the solar neighborhood and young stellar associations.

Abstract

The solar neighbourhood is populated by nearby, young moving groups (NYMGs) of stars that are candidates to be remnants of individual stellar clusters and associations, currently dispersing in the galactic disc. To derive the initial mass function (IMF) of a large sample of NYMGs, we developed and applied an algorithm that uses photometry and astrometry from Gaia DR3 to detect NYMGs in a kinematic space. We inferred individual masses from the photometry of both the detected and the previously known candidates. We estimated the IMFs for 33 groups, 30 of them for the first time, in an average mass range $0.1<m/M_\odot<5$ with some groups going as low as $0.02~M_{\odot}$ and as high as $10~M_{\odot}$. We parameterized these IMFs using a log-normal for $m<1~M_\odot$ and a power-law for $m>1~M_\odot$. We detected 4166 source candidate members of 44 known groups, including 2545 new candidates. We recovered 44-54\% of the literature candidates and estimated a contamination rate from old field stars of 16-24\%. The candidates of the detected groups distribute along young isochrones, which suggests that they are potential members of NYMGs. Parameterizations of both the average of the 33 IMFs based on our detections ($m_c=0.25\pm0.17~M_{\odot}$, $\sigma_c=0.45\pm0.17$, and $\alpha=-2.26\pm0.09$) and the one based on the known candidates from the literature ($m_c=0.22\pm0.14~M_{\odot}$, $\sigma_c=0.45\pm0.17$, and $\alpha=-2.45\pm0.06$) are in agreement with the IMF parameterization of the solar neighbourhood and young stellar associations. Our parameterization of the average IMF together with the distribution of the detected group members along young isochrones provide strong evidence suggesting that the NYMGs are remnants of individual stellar associations and clusters and that there are no systematic biases in our detection and in the literature in the range $0.1<m/M_{\odot}<10$.