Honoring Paris Pi mi ' Legacy: Uniform Astrophysical Properties of 14 Understudied Clusters from Gaia DR3
astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.SR
Submitted: 2026-09-16
Updated: 2026-09-16
Comments: 29 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in PASP. Abstract abbreviated to meet arXiv's character limit
Project page: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Open clusters are fundamental tracers of the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Galactic disc.
Terminology
Abstract
Open clusters are fundamental tracers of the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Galactic disc. This study presents a systematic characterisation of 14 understudied open clusters from the Pismis catalogue, selected for a well-defined stellar sequence in Gaia DR3 and spanning a wide range of ages and distances. Using high-precision Gaia DR3 astrometry, we provide a high-fidelity modernisation of these historical discoveries while testing our analytical framework across diverse stellar populations. Membership probabilities were determined via the unsupervised UPMASK algorithm using Gaia DR3 positions, proper motions, and parallaxes. To ensure high sample purity, the member samples entering the isochrone fits were restricted to P >= 0.90, with astrophysical parameters calculated through membership-weighted likelihoods. Fundamental properties -- age, distance, reddening, and metallicity -- were derived using a Bayesian Nested Sampling approach to isochrone fitting, chosen for its robustness against the parameter degeneracies typical of dense Galactic fields. The 14 systems exhibit a broad range of properties, with ages from approximately 11 Myr to 1.5 Gyr and distances spanning approximately 690 to 5445 pc. These refined, uniform parameters reconcile historical observations with the precision era of modern astrophysics, providing a homogeneous baseline for systems that large-scale automated surveys recover only partially. A direct cross-match against widely used automated catalogues shows that they typically contain only about a third of the members identified here, and substantially less in the most crowded fields, underscoriecific analysis. This workcontributes to a more complete census of the Galactic disc and sets out a reproducible, per-cluster licable to the manycomparable low-latitude systems still to be characterised.
Sources
- Open clusters in 2MASS photometry - I. Structural and basic astrophysical parameters
- Astrophysical Parameters of the Open Cluster Berkeley 6
- Age determination of possible binary open clusters NGC 2383/NGC 2384 and Pismis 6/Pismis 8
- Astrophysical Parameters of 5056 Open Star Clusters from Bayesian Nested Sampling with PARSEC Isochrones
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