SCYON Abstract

Received on August 21 2003

Searching for unknown open clusters in the Tycho-2 catalog

Authors	B. S. Alessi (¹), A. Moitinho (²), W. S. Dias (¹)
Affiliation	(¹) Universidade de São Paulo, Dept. de Astronomia, CP 3386, São Paulo 01060-970, Brazil (²) CAAUL, Observatório Astronómico de Lisboa, Tapada da Ajuda, 1349-018 Lisboa, Portugal
Accepted by	Astronomy & Astrophysics
Contact	andre@oal.ul.pt
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Abstract

We present 11 new open cluster candidates found in a systematic search for unknown star clusters using the astrometric and photometric data included in the Tycho2 catalog. The possible existence of these stellar aggregates is supported by the analysis of proper motions, color-magnitude diagrams, stellar density distributions, and by the visual inspection of the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) plates. With these tools we were able to determine mean absolute proper motions as well as preliminary reddenings, distances and ages for the majority of the candidates. We found that most of them are possibly nearby (closer than ~600 pc) open clusters never studied before.