English

Astrophysical Parameters of 5056 Open Star Clusters from Bayesian Nested Sampling with PARSEC Isochrones

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-05-25 v1

Abstract

We present a homogeneous catalogue of fundamental astrophysical parameters -- age, metallicity ([Fe/H]), heliocentric distance, and colour excess E(GBPGRP)E(G_{\mathrm{BP}}-G_{\mathrm{RP}}) -- 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 ZiniZ_{\mathrm{ini}} 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 ηfit0.80\eta_{\mathrm{fit}} \ge 0.80. This high-quality subset spans ages 0.003-5.5~Gyr (log(Age/yr)\log(\mathrm{Age/yr}) median 8.33±0.348.33 \pm 0.34~dex), heliocentric distances 88-19,011 pc (median 2,150~pc), metallicities 1.17[Fe/H]+0.42-1.17 \le \mathrm{[Fe/H]} \le +0.42~dex (median +0.002+0.002 dex), and extinctions up to AG=7.37A_G = 7.37~mag (median 1.07~mag). The catalogue is made publicly available via CDS/VizieR; the complete nested-sampling posterior chains are archived on Zenodo.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:28:38.321Z