Speaker
Description
The tidal tails of stellar clusters are an important tool for studying the clusters’ birth conditions, their evolution, coupling, and interaction with the Galactic potential, and to understand how field stars populate the Milky Way. Thanks to Gaia, much progress has been accomplished in finding tails of open clusters. I will show here that such tidal tails are much longer than previously observed, and that their identification requires not only a sophisticated analysis of the Gaia catalogue, using the convergent point method and clustering algorithms, but ideally, the use of N-body simulations and the new compact convergent point method. I will highlight recent results about the tails of several open clusters, which extend over several hundreds of parsecs.
