TY  - GEN
CY  - Heidelberg
AV  - public
Y1  - 2019///
TI  - Peering into the Milky Way disk: Gaia's Perspective of our Galaxy's Open Clusters
ID  - heidok27518
A1  - Yen, Steffi Xiang-Ting
UR  - https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/27518/
N2  - In the pre-Gaia era, one of the largest collections of open clusters and their parameters was the Milky Way Star Cluster (MWSC) catalog, which consisted of 2808 open clusters. This sample was nearly complete up to a distance of about 1.8~kpc from the Sun, with the exception of a subset of old nearby clusters. However, with the unprecedented precision of astrometric and photometric data from Gaia, a more accurate census on the number of true open clusters can be achieved, also providing improved cluster parameters and detection of new clusters. With this aim, I developed an automated cluster characterization pipeline to consistently determine cluster membership from astrometry and cluster parameters via isochrone fitting to cluster multi-band photometry. Using Gaia DR1/TGAS data, I analyzed 24 nearby open clusters and found evidence for the non-existence of some clusters. With Gaia DR2 data, I reanalyzed the full MWSC cluster sample, successfully obtaining cluster memberships and parameters for 1873 clusters and denying the existence of 912 clusters. This is the first study, to date, to homogeneously analyze the largest catalog of open clusters. My results show that unlike previously thought, the open cluster census is very incomplete, even at the smallest distances, and thus a dedicated search for new clusters is required in order to gain a full understanding of the open cluster population.
ER  -