Where Can I Find a List of Stars in Gould's Belt?

[hellfire]

Does anyone know where to find a list of stars and objects that are part of Gould's Belt? I am not interested in a list of the constellations through which Gould's Belt spans in the sky, but in a list of each of the (most visible or relevant) objects that are actually part of it.

 

[Nereid]

http://www.rssd.esa.int/SA-general/Projects/GAIA_files/LATEX2HTML/node29.html" contains a wealth of references, at least some of which are likely to have the data you seek (whether these references are publicly available, for free, is a quite different question!).

 

[hellfire]

Thanks Nereid, I knew part of those references and some of them indeed mention some stars and objects of the belt. However, none of them contain a list. In a first step I am only interested in the brightest stars, those that can be observed with naked eye. Thus I might try to set up a list by myself, because there should not be too much. However, even this will be a lot of work because I should go through the stars of the relevant constellations one by one checking in papers or websites whether they belong or not to the belt. Any further idea / help is appreciated.

 

[Nereid]

The http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9809227" is about the Hipparcos results (so all stars will be brighter than ~12 mag).

The paper discusses a number of nearby OB associations, and says that several (but not all) are members of the Gould Belt.

There is a table, at the end of the paper, with lists of stars which belong to each OB association.

So the only Gould Belt stars that you would be missing would be those that do not belong to one or other of these OB associations (a more careful read of the paper may clarify this point).

 

[hellfire]

OK, thanks, this may be a good way to proceed to find an answer.

 

[Nereid]

Another suggestion: since all you are interested in is those brighter than ~6, and since you know the boundary (on the sky, in terms of RA and Dec) of the Belt, and since the Hipparcos data is public, then a search through that data, selecting for the region (RA, Dec), stars closer than 500 ly (or was it pc?), and brighter than 6, you'll get all the Belt stars.

You may also get some others (closer than the Belt, for example), but they should be few, and relatively easy to remove "by hand", right?

 

[hellfire]

I am not sure this will work. There should be lots (?) of other stars like our sun that are just passing through the belt. It might work better if I could additionally require a maximal age (of about 50 My; the age of Gould's belt) but even in that case I would have some doubts about this procedure.

 

[Nereid]

You've got me curious now.

Maybe some rough numbers might help ... can you quickly select all the stars in the HIP catalogue, brighter than 6, within the (RA, Dec) bounds of Gould's Belt? No need to be too precise (the borders just need to be approx OK).

How many are there?

Of these, what is the distance distribution? From the literature, what is the generally used number for the thickness of the Belt (= depth, in pc)? Does the distribution seem to have a fairly obvious break?

How many stars are left, after these two cuts?

Bottom line: you may be able to do a Pareto ("80/20") - or three - on the data, and get a list that is good enough for whatever purpose you want it.

 

[hellfire]

I took a look to this http://archive.ast.cam.ac.uk/hipp/hipparcos.html but it seams not very intuitive. There is an explanation how to use it and I will try to get familiar with this.

 

[hellfire]

Well, it's not easy... I do not exactly know the Dec, RA ranges for Gould's belt, but from the constellations it spans (Vela, Puppis, Canis Major, Orion, Taurus, Perseus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Lyra, Ophiucus, Scorpius, Centaurus and again Vela, etc.) it seams that it spans from Dec -70 to Dec + 50 and RA 9 h to RA 13 h. This is not the position of the belt but the area of the sky contained within it.

Anyway I was not able to impose any ranges in the Hipparcos query. Without them, the number of stars with mag < 4 and distance less than 500 pc (parallax of > 2 milliarcsec) is about 450. Even if the Dec, RA ranges would reduce the number, these might be still too much for me to handle: the query results gives references to catalogues and I might spend a lot of time searching for the name and location of the star.

Of course you are probably right that this is the way to proceed for a complete and systematic analysis. However, I feel this is too much effort for my first objective: to be able to identify the members of Gould’s belt that are visible to naked eye in the night sky. It seams to me that the most reasonable way to proceed is to make a list of stars of these constellations and then check their distances and possible locations within the OB associations mentioned in the paper you have recommended.