Orbital analysis of old, high latitude clusters

Abstract

In early 2020, studies using Gaia DR2 provided us with information about all the visible clusters existent in the Milky Way. Two of them stood out for having high latitude, namely Berkeley 20 and Berkeley 29. The goal of this study is to shed some light into the clusters origin using orbital analysis. The results indicate that these old, high latitude clusters have almost circular orbits around the Galactic centre which seem to confirm the disc origin. We also conclude that Berkeley 20 value of Z is purely coincidental, given its uniform distribution across all ranges of latitude. Berkeley 29 positive value of Z suggests that the line-of-nodes of the Galactic plane does not correspond to the one imposed in the warped models, given its distribution on the XY projection