Discovering 7 Potential New Clusters by Visualizing Gaia Data

We created a useful, interactive, 3D visualization tool in MATLAB that can be used by students to explore Gaia data and hunt for over-dense regions in space. We used our tool to visualize the local solar neighborhood out to 50 pc, and developed further code to isolate over-densities using stellar positional information only. We present preliminary findings of 7 highly dense regions of stars within 50 pc of the Sun that have not been previously identified, with 3 of these regions being larger than the Hyades core. Candidate cluster members were selected by applying MATLAB ’s knnsearch function to data from the Gaia Early Data Release 3 catalog. Our methodology functions as a simple but effective first slice for identifying clusters in 3D space.