Letter to the Editor

From moving groups to star formation in the solar neighborhood

¹ University of Vienna, Department of Astrophysics, Türkenschanzstrasse 17, 1180 Wien, Austria
² Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 475 North Charter Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA
³ INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, Via Osservatorio 20, 10025 Pino Torinese, (TO), Italy

^⋆ Corresponding author: cameren.swiggum@univie.ac.at

Received: 1 April 2025
Accepted: 16 May 2025

Abstract

Moving groups in the solar neighborhood are ensembles of commoving stars, likely originating due to forces from spiral arms, the Galactic bar, or external perturbations. Their comovement with young clusters indicates recent star formation within these moving groups, but a lack of precise 3D position and velocity measurements has obscured this connection. Using backward orbit integrations of 509 clusters within 1 kpc–based on Gaia DR3 and supplemented with APOGEE-2 and GALAH DR3 radial velocities–we traced their evolution over the past 100 Myr. We find that most clusters separate into three spatial groups that each trace one of the Pleiades, Coma Berenices, and Sirius moving groups. The same trend is not seen for the Hyades moving group. The young clusters of the Alpha Persei, Messier 6, and Collinder 135 families of clusters, previously found to have formed in three massive star-forming complexes, commove with either the Pleiades (Alpha Persei and Messier 6) or the Coma Berenices (Collinder 135). Our results provide a sharper view of how large-scale Galactic dynamics have shaped recent, nearby star formation.