Structural Parameters of the Thin Disk Population from Evolved Stars in Solar Neighborhood

Abstract

This study investigates the structural parameters of the thin-disk population by analyzing the spatial distribution of evolved stars in the solar neighbourhood. From the $\it Gaia$ Data Release 3 database, about 39.1 million stars within 1 kpc and with relative parallax errors $\sigma_{\varpi}/\varpi\leq 0.10$ were selected. The photometric data was corrected for extinction using a Galactic dust map. The sample was refined by considering the color-magnitude region $M_{\rm G}\times (G_{\rm BP}-G_{\rm RP})_0$ associated with evolved stars, applying a stricter parallax error limit of $\sigma_{\varpi}/\varpi\leq 0.02$, and yielding 671,600 stars. The star sample was divided into 36 regions based on their Galactic coordinates, with evolved stars in the absolute magnitude range of $-1< M_{\rm G}~{\rm (mag)}\leq 4$ further split into five one-unit magnitude intervals. This led to 180 subgroups whose space density profiles were modelled using a single-component Galaxy model. The analysis shows that the space densities are in agreement with the literature and that the scale heights vary with $200<H~{\rm (pc)}<600$ interval to their absolute magnitudes. Red clump stars in the solar neighbourhood were also estimated to have a scale height of $295\pm10$ pc. These findings indicate that evolved stars with bright absolute magnitudes originate from the evolution of the early spectral-type stars with short scale height, while fainter ones come from the evolution of the intermediate spectral-type stars with large scale height, suggesting variations in scale height reflect the contribution of Galactic evolution processes.