Speaker
Description
In the past decade, Gaia has doubled the known population of Milky Way star clusters. With more than 1.5 billion stars expected to receive astrometric solutions in Gaia DR4, in addition to epoch photometry and astrometry, platforms like SPACIOUS will be essential for analyzing these increasingly large datasets. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the clustering algorithms widely used in astronomy and recent all-sky searches for open clusters in Gaia data. I will also show an example of recovering some well-known open clusters with HDBSCAN. I will conclude by highlighting key computational challenges in scaling these methods to the full Gaia catalogue—particularly the large-scale merging and deduplication of cluster candidates—and present some preliminary attempts using SPACIOUS.
