Extended stellar systems in the solar neighborhood. IV. Meingast 1: the most massive stellar stream in the solar neighborhood

Abstract

Context. Nearby stellar streams carry unique information on the dynamical evolution and disruption of stellar systems in the Galaxy, the mass distribution in the disk, and they provide unique targets for planet formation and evolution studies. Recently, Meingast 1, a 120° stellar stream with a length of at least 400 pc, was dicovered.
Aims: We aim to revisit the Meingast 1 stream to search for new members within its currently known 400 pc extent, using Gaia DR2 data and an innovative machine learning approach.
Methods: We used a bagging classifier of one-class support vector machines with Gaia DR2 data to perform a 5D search (positions and proper motions) for new stream members. The ensemble was created by randomly sampling 2.4 million hyper-parameter realizations admitting classifiers that fulfill a set of prior assumptions. We used the variable prediction frequency resulting from the multitude of classifiers to estimate a stream membership criterion, which we used to select high-fidelity sources. We used the HR diagram and the Cartesian velocity distribution as test and validation tools.
Results: We find about 2000 stream members with high fidelity, or about an order of magnitude more than previously known, unveiling the stream's population across the entire stellar mass spectrum, from B stars to M stars, including white dwarfs. We find that, apart from being slightly more metal poor, the HRD of the stream is indistinguishable from that of the Pleiades cluster. For the mass range at which we are mostly complete, ∼0.2 M_⊙ < M < ∼4 M_⊙, we find a normal IMF, allowing us to estimate the total mass of stream to be about 2000 M_⊙, making this relatively young stream by far the most massive one known. In addition, we identify several white dwarfs as potential stream members.
Conclusions: The nearby Meingast 1 stream, due to its richness, age, and distance, is a new fundamental laboratory for star and planet formation and evolution studies for the poorly studied and gravitationally unbound star formation mode. We also demonstrate that one-class support vector machines can be effectively used to unveil the full stellar populations of nearby stellar systems with Gaia data.

The full source catalog described in Table G.1 is only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (ftp://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/639/A64

In our original discovery paper, we did not name the stream. The authors of the first follow-up paper (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="R8">http://Curtis et al. 2019</xref>http://) contacted us regarding a name for the structure but did not agree with our proposed name and decided on their own to name the system the Pisces-Eridanus stream. Their chosen name, however, not only does not capture the true size of the stream (the stream stretches across at least 10 constellations and likely extends beyond these), it is ambiguous as it can lead to confusion with the Pisces moving group (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="R3">http://Binks et al. 2018</xref>http://). In general, given the number of new streams being found by Gaia and the finite number of constellations, it seems appropriate to move away from using constellations to name streams (e.g., <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="R17">http://Ibata et al. 2019</xref>http://). An unambiguous remedy to this particular situation is to name the stream after the original discoverer, which we do in this paper, naming the structure Meingast 1.