Table · dataset · 2026
A new Gaia census of OB associations
Listed in IVOA Registry (Virtual Observatory)
OB associations are primordial tracers of star formation and Galactic structure.
Description
Originally defined about 80 years ago, their historical membership lists have been superseded thanks to the precise astrometry from ESA's Gaia's satellite. Recent studies have however been mostly focused on individual OB associations or limited by the coverage of spectroscopic surveys.
In this paper, we exploit a complete census of ~25000 O- and B-type stars within 1kpc of the Sun to produce a highly-reliable catalogue of 56 OB associations using the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm, increasing the number of known OB associations by a factor of two within this volume. We assess the validity of this catalogue by crossmatching our OB association members with other catalogues of OB associations, star clusters and young stellar groups, confirming the high-confidence of our census of OB associations.
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We characterize these OB associations physically (total initial stellar mass, number of OB stars, ...) and kinematically (velocity dispersion, linear expansion ages, ...). The majority of the OB associations (38 out of 56) exhibit a significant expansion pattern in at least one direction, including 12 in both plane-of-the-sky directions, though differences in expansion velocity suggest anisotropical expansion patterns.
We compare the locations of these OB associations with superclouds and features in the local Milky Way such as the Radcliffe Wave and discuss the implications for star formation in the solar neighbourhood.
Links
Where it is published
- Reference page cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/MNRAS/549/G853 ↗
landing page · from IVOA Registry
Documentation and papers
- ADS 2026MNRAS.549g.853Q ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2026MNRAS.549g.853Q ↗
publication · from IVOA Registry
Catalogue records · 2
- VOResource record dc.g-vo.org/oai.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=ivo_vor&identifier=ivo%3… ↗
metadata API · from IVOA Registry
- Registry record (GAVO) dc.g-vo.org/I/cds.vizier/j/mnras/549/g853 ↗
catalogue entry · from IVOA Registry
Topics
- Stated by source
- Optical
- From keywords
- Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Inferred from text
- Astronomical sciences 69%
Provenance · 1 source records, 9 field assertions
| Source | Key | Last seen | Raw |
|---|---|---|---|
| IVOA Registry (Virtual Observatory) | ivo://cds.vizier/j/mnras/549/g853 | 12 d ago | JSON v1 |
| Field | Assertion | Extractor | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| access_level | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| concepts[field].anzsrc:group:5101 | enrichment · IVOA Registry | taxonomy-embedding@1.1.0 | title+keywords+description (69%) |
| concepts[field].local:field:astronomy | mapping · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| concepts[modality].ivoa_waveband:optical | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| description | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | rr.resource.res_description |
| license_text | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| publication_date | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| title | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | rr.resource.res_title |
| updated_date | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 |