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Most nearby young star clusters formed in three massive complexes

Nature volume 631, pages 49–53 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Efforts to unveil the structure of the local interstellar medium and its recent star-formation history have spanned the past 70 years (refs. 1,2,3,4,5,6). Recent studies using precise data from space astrometry missions have revealed nearby, newly formed star clusters with connected origins7,8,9,10,11,12. Nonetheless, mapping young clusters across the entire sky back to their natal regions has been hindered by a lack of clusters with precise radial-velocity data. Here we show that 155 out of 272 (57%) high-quality young clusters13,14 within 1 kiloparsec of the Sun arise from three distinct spatial volumes. This conclusion is based on the analysis of data from the third Gaia release15 and other large-scale spectroscopic surveys. At present, dispersed throughout the solar neighbourhood, their past positions more than 30 million years ago reveal that these families of clusters each formed in one of three compact, massive star-forming complexes. One of these families includes all of the young clusters near the Sun—the Taurus and Scorpius–Centaurus star-forming complexes16,17. We estimate that more than 200 supernovae were produced from these families and argue that these clustered supernovae produced both the Local Bubble18 and the largest nearby supershell GSH 238+00+09 (ref. 19), both of which are clearly visible in modern three-dimensional dust maps20,21,22.

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Fig. 1: A galactic bird’s-eye (x–y) view of the orbits of the clusters over time.
Fig. 2: A bird’s-eye (x–y) view of the present-day positions of galactic clusters overlaid on a kiloparsec-scale, 3D dust map (greyscale).
Fig. 3: All-sky positions of the clusters’ stars and high-resolution optical images of the most notable clusters.

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Data availability

The table of 272 clusters constructed and analysed in this work, along with the interactive versions of Figs. 1 and 2, are publicly available at the Harvard Dataverse. The table of clusters can be downloaded at the following link and includes the clusters’ family memberships, mass estimates and estimated supernovae counts recovered in this work: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VYBZQS. The interactive version of Fig. 1 can be downloaded at the following link: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IDJGDW. The interactive version of Fig. 2 can be downloaded at the following link: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MYWA1K.

Code availability

The code used for the analysis is available from C.S. on reasonable request. Publicly available software libraries were used, including galpy23, astropy57 and hdbscan24. The static figures were produced using the matplotlib58 and healpy59 libraries and the 3D interactive figures were made using the plotly Python library. The interactive all-sky figure was developed using the Python WorldWide Telescope (pywwt) library.

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Acknowledgements

We thank B. Elmegreen for his helpful discussion on the results presented in this work. We also thank J. Carifio for his assistance in developing the all-sky interactive figure. J.A. was co-funded by the European Union (ERC, ISM-FLOW, 101055318). Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. S. Ratzenböck acknowledges funding by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG; https://www.ffg.at/) under project number FO999892674. J.G. acknowledges funding by the FFG under project number 873708. J.G. gratefully acknowledges the Collaborative Research Center 1601 (SFB 1601 sub-project A5) financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 500700252. A.G. and C.Z. acknowledge support by NASA ADAP grant 80NSSC21K0634 ‘Knitting Together the Milky Way: An Integrated Model of the Galaxy’s Stars, Gas, and Dust’. C.Z. acknowledges that support for this work was provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant no. HST-HF2-51498.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. This project was partly developed at the Lorentz Center workshop ‘Mapping the Milky Way’, held in Leiden, the Netherlands, in February 2023. We acknowledge Interstellar Institute’s programme ‘II6’ and the Paris-Saclay University’s Institut Pascal for hosting discussions that nourished the development of the ideas behind this work. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC; https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Astrophysics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Cameren Swiggum, João Alves, Sebastian Ratzenböck, Núria Miret-Roig, Josefa Großschedl & Stefan Meingast

  2. Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater, WI, USA

    Robert Benjamin

  3. Data Science @ Uni Vienna, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Sebastian Ratzenböck

  4. Physikalisches Institut, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany

    Josefa Großschedl

  5. Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Alyssa Goodman, Ralf Konietzka & Catherine Zucker

  6. Landessternwarte, Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Emily L. Hunt & Sabine Reffert

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Contributions

C.S. led the work and wrote most of the text. All authors contributed to the text. C.S., J.A., R.B. and S. Ratzenböck led the data analysis, aided by J.G. and E.L.H. C.S., J.A. and R.B. led the interpretation of the results, aided by N.M.-R., J.G., S.M., R.K. and C.Z. C.S., N.M.-R., E.L.H. and S. Reffert led the compilation of the stellar cluster catalogue. C.S., J.A. and A.G. led the visualization efforts.

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Correspondence to Cameren Swiggum.

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Nature thanks John Bally and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Sizes of each family computed for each time step of their orbits.

Dots demarcate the time steps and sizes of most compactness for a family. The error bars represent the 16th and 86th percentiles for the most compact size and the associated time, as determined from 1,000 bootstrap samples of clusters randomly selected from a given family. The ticks along the size evolution profile of each family indicate the birth times of individual clusters within that family.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Histograms of cluster family age distributions.

Each histogram shows the number of clusters born as a function of lookback time for each cluster family. The bin widths were chosen on the basis of the median age error. The y axis shows the fraction of a family’s stars in each age bin. The names of notable clusters are listed above their respective age bins.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file includes links to access Supplementary Figs. 1–3 and the legend for Supplementary Table 1.

Supplementary Table 1

This data table includes the parameters of the 272 clusters combined from refs. 13,14 used in this work. The csv file and its column descriptions are available at the following link: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VYBZQS.

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Swiggum, C., Alves, J., Benjamin, R. et al. Most nearby young star clusters formed in three massive complexes. Nature 631, 49–53 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07496-9

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