Open cluster nondegenerate stars analysis

Although astrophysics provides a wide variety of physical conditions in which this redshift should be significant, until very recently the observational evidence for this gravitational effect was limited to the light emitted by the Sun and white dwarfs. Gaia-DR2 astrometric and kinematic data, in combination with other spectroscopic observations, provides a test bench to validate such predictions in statistical terms.

The aim of this paper is to analyze several thousand main-sequence and giant stars in open clusters (OCs) in order to measure the gravitational redshift effect. Observationally, a spectral shift will depend on the stellar mass-to-radius ratio as expected from the theoretical estimation of relativity. After the analysis, the obtained correlation coefficient between theoretical predictions and observations for 28 (51) OCs is a=0.977+/-0.218 (0.899+/-0.137).