Selection function Gaia DR3 open cluster census Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Hunt E.L.
  2. Cantat-Gaudin T.
  3. Anders F.
  4. Malhotra S.
  5. Spina L.,Castro-Ginard A.
  6. Cavallo L.
  7. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

Open clusters are among the most useful and widespread tracers of Galactic structure. The completeness of the Galactic open cluster census, however, remains poorly understood. For the first time ever, we establish the selection function of an entire open cluster census, publishing our results as an open-source Python package for use by the community. Our work is valid for the Hunt & Reffert (2024A&A...686A..42H, Cat. J/A+A/686/A42) catalogue of clusters in Gaia DR3. We developed and open-sourced our cluster simulator from our first work. Then, we performed 80590 injection and retrievals of simulated open clusters to test the Hunt & Reffert (2024A&A...686A..42H, Cat. J/A+A/686/A42) catalogue's sensitivity. We fit a logistic model of cluster detectability that depends only on a cluster's number of stars, median parallax error, Gaia data density, and a user-specified significance threshold. We find that our simple model accurately predicts cluster detectability, with a 94.53% accuracy on our training data that is comparable to a machine-learning based model with orders of magnitude more parameters. Our model itself offers numerous insights on why certain clusters are detected. We briefly use our model to show that cluster detectability depends on non-intuitive parameters, such as a cluster's proper motion, and we show that even a modest 25km/s boost to a cluster's orbital speed can result in an almost 3 times higher detection probability, depending on its position. In addition, we publish our raw cluster injection and retrievals and cluster memberships, which could be used for a number of other science cases -- such as estimating cluster membership incompleteness. Using our results, selection effect-corrected studies are now possible with the open cluster census. Our work will enable a number of brand new types of study, such as detailed comparisons between the Milky Way's cluster census and recent extragalactic cluster samples.

Keywords
  1. milky-way-galaxy
  2. surveys
  3. open-star-clusters
  4. visible-astronomy
  5. astronomical-models
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2026A&A...706A.341H
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/706/A341
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/706/A341
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier/bc-p2/ldeb

Access

Web browser access HTML
https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/A+A/706/A341
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/A+A/706/A341
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/A+A/706/A341
IVOA Table Access TAP
https://tapvizier.cds.unistra.fr/TAPVizieR/tap
Run SQL-like queries with TAP-enabled clients (e.g., TOPCAT).
IVOA Cone Search SCS
For use with a cone search client (e.g., TOPCAT).
https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/conesearch/J/A+A/706/A341/clusters?
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/conesearch/J/A+A/706/A341/clusters?
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/conesearch/J/A+A/706/A341/clusters?

History

2026-02-25T09:22:41Z
Resource record created
2026-02-25T09:22:41Z
Created
2026-04-02T20:03:00Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr