Identifying Stellar Streams in Gaia DR2 with Data Mining Techniques

Understand

Streams of stars from captured dwarf galaxies and dissolved globular clusters are identifiable through the similarity of their orbital parameters, a fact that remains true long after the streams have dispersed spatially.

• We calculate the integrals of motion for 44855 stars, to a distance of 4 kpc from the Sun, which have full and accurate 6D phase space positions in the Gaia DR2 catalogue.
• We then apply a novel combination of data mining, numerical and statistical techniques to search for stellar streams.
• This process returns seven high-confidence streams (including four that were not previously known), all of which display tight clustering in the integral of motion space.