Kavli Affiliate: Anna Frebel
| First 5 Authors: Xiaowei Ou, Lina Necib, Anna Frebel, ,
| Summary:
We apply the clustering algorithm HDBSCAN on the Gaia early third data
release astrometry combined with the Gaia second data release radial velocity
measurements of almost 5.5 million stars to identify the local stellar
kinematic substructures in the solar neighborhood. Understanding these
structures helps build a more complete picture of the formation of the Milky
Way, as well as an empirical phase space distribution of dark matter that would
inform detection experiments. The main goal of this study is to provide a list
of the most stable clusters, by taking into account the measurement
uncertainties and studying the stability of the clustering results. We apply
the clustering algorithm in two spaces, in velocity space in order to study
recently accreted structures, and in action-angle space to find phase-mixed
structures. We find 23 (6) robust clusters in velocity space (action-angle
space) that are consistently not associated with noise. They are attributed to
the known structures: the Gaia Sausage-Enceladus, the Helmi Stream, and
globular cluster NGC 3201 are found in both spaces, while NGC 104 and the thick
disk (Sequoia) are identified in velocity space (action-angle space). We
discuss the kinematic properties of these structures and study whether many of
the small clusters belong to a similar larger cluster based on their chemical
abundances. Although we do not identify any new structures, we find that the
HDBSCAN member selection of already known structures is unstable to input
kinematics of the stars when resampled within their uncertainties. We therefore
present the most stable subset of local kinematic structures, which are
consistently identified by the clustering algorithm, and emphasize the need to
take into account error propagation during both the manual and automated
identification of stellar structures, both for existing ones as well as future
discoveries. (abridged)
| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Anna Frebel”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=10