Pearls on a String: Numerous Stellar Clusters Strung along the Same Orbit

Abstract

Stars originate from the dense interstellar medium, which exhibits filamentary structure to scales of $\sim 1$ kpc in galaxies like our Milky Way. We explore quantitatively how much resulting large-scale correlation there is among different stellar clusters and associations in \emph{orbit phase space}, characterized here by actions and angles. As a starting point, we identified 55 prominent stellar overdensities in the 6D space of orbit (actions) and orbital phase (angles), among the $\sim$ 2.8 million stars with radial velocities from Gaia EDR3 and $d\le 800$ pc. We then explored the orbital \emph{phase} distribution of all sample stars in the same \emph{orbit} patch as any one of these 55 overdensities. We find that very commonly numerous other distinct orbital phase overdensities exist along these same orbits, like pearls on a string. These `pearls' range from known stellar clusters to loose, unrecognized associations. Among orbit patches defined by one initial orbit-phase overdensity 50\% contain at least 8 additional orbital-phase pearls of 10 cataloged members; 20\% of them contain 20 additional pearls. This is in contrast to matching orbit patches sampled from a smooth mock catalog, or offset nearby orbit patches, where there are only 2 (or 5, respectively) comparable pearls. Our findings quantify for the first time how common it is for star clusters and associations to form at distinct orbital phases of nearly the same orbit. This may eventually offer a new way to probe the 6D orbit structure of the filamentary interstellar medium.

21 pages including 15 figures and appendix. Accepted for publication in ApJ. As this will be my last submission to arXiv I wanted to thank everyone who has helped me along all these years with words of encouragement and support

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• Significance Mode Analysis (SigMA) for hierarchical structures. An application to the Sco-Cen OB association
• Disconnecting the Dots: Re-Examining the Nature of Stellar "Strings" in the Milky Way
• Star-by-star dynamical evolution of the physical pair of the Collinder 135 and UBC 7 open clusters
• From moving groups to star formation in the Solar Neighborhood
• Fundamental limits to orbit reconstruction due to non-conservation of stellar actions in a Milky Way-like simulation