Astrophysical Parameters of 5056 Open Star Clusters from Bayesian Nested Sampling with PARSEC Isochrones
Abstract
We present a homogeneous catalogue of fundamental astrophysical parameters -- age, metallicity ([Fe/H]), heliocentric distance, and colour excess -- for 5,056 open star clusters drawn from the Unified Cluster Catalogue (UCC). All parameters are derived uniformly from Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) colour-magnitude diagrams via Bayesian Nested Sampling with PARSEC stellar isochrones, with no manual intervention on individual clusters. Initial metallicity is treated as a free parameter throughout, yielding a photometric [Fe/H] estimate for every cluster. Physically motivated priors -- parallax-based distances from Gaia DR3 astrometry, spectrophotometric metallicity constraints from Gaia XP spectra where available, and interstellar reddening from the Schlegel-Finkbeiner-Davis dust map -- reduce CMD degeneracies without anchoring the fit to any external parameter catalogue. Of the 5,056 clusters, 3,766 (74.5\%) satisfy the fit-quality criterion . This high-quality subset spans ages 0.003-5.5~Gyr ( median ~dex), heliocentric distances 88-19,011 pc (median 2,150~pc), metallicities ~dex (median dex), and extinctions up to ~mag (median 1.07~mag). The catalogue is made publicly available via CDS/VizieR; the complete nested-sampling posterior chains are archived on Zenodo.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.23802,
title = {Astrophysical Parameters of 5056 Open Star Clusters from Bayesian Nested Sampling with PARSEC Isochrones},
author = {Olcay Plevne and Furkan Akbaba},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.23802},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
21 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables. Submitted to ApJS. Comments are welcome