APOGEE stars members of 35 star clusters

We have applied statistical tests showing that some pairs of clusters (e.g., NGC 2458-NGC 2420) are indistinguishable from each other when using the Apache Point Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) chemical abundances. However, for most clusters we are able to automatically assign membership with metric scores similar to previous works. The confusion level of the automatically selected clusters is consistent with statistical tests that demonstrate the impossibility of perfectly discriminating all the clusters from each other.

These statistical tests, and confusion levels establish a limit for the prospect of blindly identifying stars born in the same cluster based solely on chemical abundances. We find that some of the algorithms explored are capable of blindly identify stellar populations with similar ages and chemical distributions in the APOGEE data. Even though we are not able to fully separate the clusters from each other, the main confusion arises from clusters with similar ages.

Since there are stellar clusters that are chemically indistinguishable, our study supports the notion of extending weak chemical tagging involving families of clusters instead of individual clusters.