Low-mass young stars in the Milky Way unveiled by DBSCAN and Gaia EDR3: Mapping the star forming regions within 1.5 kpc

Vol. 664
14. Catalogs and data

Low-mass young stars in the Milky Way unveiled by DBSCAN and Gaia EDR3: Mapping the star forming regions within 1.5 kpc

Prisinzano et al. provide a very detailed map of the nearby regions of star formation, including many newly discovered ones. By combining the unprecedented astrometric precision of Gaia data, a machine learning unsupervised clustering algorithm, and the stellar evolutionary properties from the exquisite Gaia color-magnitude diagrams, they have identified more than 100,000 young low mass stars clustered in hundreds of star-forming regions younger than 10 million years within about 1.5 Kpc. A substantial number of them are recognized for the first time, and the bulk of previously known star-forming regions have also been detected, enabling the authors to homogeneously single out the asymmetric complex structure of the Galaxy in the solar neighborhood. This catalog can serve as a base for future studies on star formation history, cluster dynamics, and the initial mass function in the solar neighborhood, as well as detailed studies of circumstellar disk evolution and the search for young giant planets via direct imaging.