A Gaia astrometric view of the open clusters Pleiades, Praesepe and Blanco 1

Abstract

Context. Near open clusters as Pleiades, Praesepe and Blanco 1 have been extensively studied due to their proximity to the Sun. The Gaia data brings the opportunity to investigate these clusters, since it contains valuable astrometric and photometric information which can be used to update their kinematic and stellar properties. Aims. Our goal is to carry out a star membership study in these nearby open clusters employing an astrometric model with proper motions and an unsupervised clustering machine learning algorithm using positions, proper motions and parallaxes. The star members are selected from the cross-matching between both methods. Methods. We use the Gaia DR3 catalogue to determine star members using two approaches: a classical Bayesian model and the unsupervised machine learning algorithm DBSCAN. For star members we build the radial density profiles, the spatial distributions and compute the King parameters. The ages and metallicities were estimated using the BASE-9 Bayesian software. Results. We identified 958, 744 and 488 star members for the Pleiades, Praesepe and Blanco 1 respectively. We corrected the distances and built the spatial distributions, finding that Praesepe and Blanco 1 have elongated shape structures. The distances, ages and metallicities obtained were consistent with the reported in the literature. Conclusions. We obtained catalogues of star members, updated kinematic and stellar parameters for these open clusters. We found that the proper motions model can find a similar number of members as the unsupervised clustering algorithm does when the cluster population form an overdensity in the vector point diagram. It allows to select an adequate size of the proper motions region to run these methods. Our analysis found stars that are being directed towards the outskirts of the Praesepe and Blanco 1, which exhibit elongated shapes.