| Name: | Souradeep Bhattacharya |
| Affiliation: | Inter University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, India |
| Conference ID : | ASI2022_94 |
| Title : | A Gaia EDR3 search for tidal tails in disintegrating open clusters |
| Authors : | Souradeep Bhattacharya (Inter University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, India) Khushboo K. Rao (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India) Manan Agarwal (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India) Shanmugha Balan (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India) Kaushar Vaidya (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India) |
| Abstract Type: | Poster |
| Abstract Category : | Stars, ISM and Galaxy |
| Abstract : | Following the public data release of deep precise stellar astrometric and photometric measurements from the Gaia space telescope, open cluster science has undergone a renaissance. This is because the precise measurements allow for robust determination of open cluster membership. This has particularly resulted in the discovery of open clusters having a large corona as well as tidal tails, structures previously observed for only a select few globular clusters. 13 such open clusters with tidal tails had been identified individually in Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) and Early Data Release 3 (EDR3), including our identified tidal tails in NGC 752. For the first time, we carry out a systemic search for tidal tails in a sample of open clusters with known relatively elongated morphology. We identify the member stars of these clusters from EDR3 using our robust membership determination algorithm, ML-MOC. We identify 45 open clusters having a stellar corona beyond the tidal radius, 20 of which exhibit extended tails. The tidal nature of these tails is confirmed based on their relative position to the cluster orbit direction in galactocentric coordinates. Notably we find NGC 6940 (at a distance of ~1 kpc) is the furthest open cluster exhibiting tidal tails, that are ~50 pc from its center, while also identifying ~40 pc long tidal tails for the nearby Pleiades. We also find that all 45 open clusters exhibit mass segregation based on their fitted mass function slopes, with the effect being generally more pronounced in the intra-tidal stars than the extra-tidal ones. Furthermore, we estimate the initial masses (Mi) of these open clusters finding that some of them, having Mi>10^4 M_\sun, could be the dissolving remnants of Young Massive Clusters. |