The Stellar "Snake"-V: the census within 3 kpc in the Solar Neighborhood
Abstract
We present a Gaia DR3 source-level catalogue of Stellar Snake complexes within 3 kpc of the Sun. We define a Stellar Snake as a mutually coherent association of stellar overdensities, characterised by consistent positions, kinematics, orbital invariants, and ages, rather than a single gravitationally bound object. Moving beyond catalogue searches seeded by known open clusters, our framework operates directly on Gaia sources to recover extended, low-density substructures and interconnecting stellar bridges. The multi-stage pipeline extracts statistically significant, non-overlapping base nodes, infers homogeneous parameters using a PointNet point-cloud regressor, and links these nodes into large-scale macro-structures in a nine-coordinate feature space spanning positions, velocities, age log t, and derived dynamical quantities (E, L_Z). After FoF-topology checking and boundary resolution, the final catalogue contains 1,180 Stellar Snake candidates with 4,196 base nodes and 692,408 unique member-star entries. Derived parameters are compared with external open-cluster catalogues and spectroscopic benchmarks. We introduce a graph-relation Snake Reliability Index (SRI) with Gold/Silver/Bronze grades to quantify structural coherence. A spatial-kinematic partition diagnostic identifies candidate subdivisions and provides core scores. At the population level, the catalogue shows an age--metallicity pattern in the jointly inferred parameters, a declining upper envelope of observed member-star entries toward older inferred ages, and a projected association between young Snake nodes, nearby spiral-arm loci, and the Radcliffe Wave. This homogeneous inventory provides an observational foundation for probing the formation, coherence, and dynamical evolution of hierarchical stellar complexes in the Milky Way.
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BibTeX
@misc{yang2026stellar,
title = {{The Stellar "Snake"-V: the census within 3 kpc in the Solar Neighborhood}},
author = {Xiang-Ming Yang and Ju-Yong Zhang and Hai-Jun Tian},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2607.00098},
eprint = {2607.00098},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00098},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Stellar "Snake"-V: the census within 3 kpc in the Solar Neighborhood
AU - Xiang-Ming Yang
AU - Ju-Yong Zhang
AU - Hai-Jun Tian
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/21
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2607.00098
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00098
AB - We present a Gaia DR3 source-level catalogue of Stellar Snake complexes within 3 kpc of the Sun. We define a Stellar Snake as a mutually coherent association of stellar overdensities, characterised by consistent positions, kinematics, orbital invariants, and ages, rather than a single gravitationally bound object. Moving beyond catalogue searches seeded by known open clusters, our framework operates directly on Gaia sources to recover extended, low-density substructures and interconnecting stellar bridges. The multi-stage pipeline extracts statistically significant, non-overlapping base nodes, infers homogeneous parameters using a PointNet point-cloud regressor, and links these nodes into large-scale macro-structures in a nine-coordinate feature space spanning positions, velocities, age log t, and derived dynamical quantities (E, L_Z). After FoF-topology checking and boundary resolution, the final catalogue contains 1,180 Stellar Snake candidates with 4,196 base nodes and 692,408 unique member-star entries. Derived parameters are compared with external open-cluster catalogues and spectroscopic benchmarks. We introduce a graph-relation Snake Reliability Index (SRI) with Gold/Silver/Bronze grades to quantify structural coherence. A spatial-kinematic partition diagnostic identifies candidate subdivisions and provides core scores. At the population level, the catalogue shows an age--metallicity pattern in the jointly inferred parameters, a declining upper envelope of observed member-star entries toward older inferred ages, and a projected association between young Snake nodes, nearby spiral-arm loci, and the Radcliffe Wave. This homogeneous inventory provides an observational foundation for probing the formation, coherence, and dynamical evolution of hierarchical stellar complexes in the Milky Way.
ER -