Stellar Paternity Tests: Tracing Stars Back to the Clusters of their Birth

The Milky Way’s hot stars generally form in open clusters within the thin disk. However, there are a small number of early-type stars that are observed at high altitudes above the disk and were likely ejected from their birth clusters within the past few million years. My student Brandon Schweers and I are working to identify from which open clusters these high-latitude B stars originated. We combine data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia Mission with a model of the Milky Way’s gravitational potential to trace the kinematic trajectories of about 100 high latitude B stars and more than 1000 known Galactic open clusters to identify past moments of intersection. I will share our results to date and discuss additional strategies to refine the cluster paternity memberships.

Speaker: Ginny McSwain, Lehigh University

Attend in person or online.  Speaker will attend via Zoom