Milky Way Star Clusters Catalog

Although they are the main constituents of the Galactic disk population, for half of the open clusters in the Milky Way reported in the literature nothing is known except the raw position and an approximate size. The main goal of this study is to determine a full set of uniform spatial, structural, kinematic, and astrophysical parameters for as many known open clusters as possible. On the basis of stellar data from PPMXL and 2MASS, the authors used a dedicated data-processing pipeline to determine kinematic and photometric membership probabilities for stars in a cluster region. For an input list of 3,784 targets from the literature, they confirm that 3,006 are real objects, the vast majority of them are open clusters, but associations and globular clusters are also present. For each confirmed object, the authors determined the exact position of the cluster center, the apparent size, proper motion, distance, color excess, and age. For about 1,500 clusters, these basic astrophysical parameters have been determined for the first time. For the bulk of the clusters the authors also derived the tidal radii. In addition, they estimated average radial velocities for more than 30% of the confirmed clusters. The present sample (called MWSC) reaches both the central parts of the Milky Way and its outer regions. It is almost complete up to 1.8 kpc from the Sun and also covers the neighboring spiral arms. However, for a small subset of the oldest open clusters (ages more than ~ 1 Gyr), the authors found some evidence of incompleteness within about 1 kpc from the Sun. This table contains the list of 3,006 Milky Way stellar clusters (MWSC) found in the 2MAst (2MASS with Astrometry) catalog presented in Paper II of this series (these clusters have source numbers below 4000), together with an additional 139 new open clusters (these clusters have source numbers between 5000 and 6000) found by the authors at high Galactic latitudes (|b_II_| &gt; 18.5 degrees) which were presented in Paper III of the series, and an additional 63 new open clusters (these clusters have source numbers between 4000 and 5000) which were presented in Paper IV of the series. The target list in Paper II from which the 3,006 open clusters was contained was compiled on the basis of present-day lists of open, globular and candidate clusters. The list of new high-latitude open clusters in Paper III was obtained from a target list of 714 density enhancements found using the 2MASS Catalog. The list of new open clusters in Paper IV was obtained from an initial list of 692 compact cluster candidates which were found by the authors by conducting an almost global search of the sky (they excluded the portions of the sky with |b_II_| &lt; 5 degrees) in the PPMXL and the UCAC4 proper-motion catalogs. For confirmed clusters, the authors determined a homogeneous set of astrophysical parameters such as membership, angular radii of the main morphological parts, mean cluster proper motions, distances, reddenings, ages, tidal parameters, and sometimes radial velocities. This table was created by the HEASARC in February 2014 based on the list of open clusters given in &lt;a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/558/A53"&gt;CDS Catalog J/A+A/558/A53&lt;/a&gt; files catalog.dat and notes.dat. It was updated in September 2014 with 139 additional star clusters from &lt;a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/568/A51"&gt;CDS Catalog J/A+A/568/A51&lt;/a&gt; files catalog.dat and notes.dat. It was further updated in October 2015 with 63 additional star clusters from &lt;a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/581/A39"&gt;CDS Catalog J/A+A/581/A39&lt;/a&gt; files catalog.dat and notes.dat. Note that this table does not include the information on candidates which turned out not to be open clusters which was also contained in these catalogs. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

Tags: __
Organization: National Aeronautics and Space Administration