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Description
The structure and evolution of the spiral arms of the Milky Way are basic but long-standing questions in astronomy. Especially the lifetime of spiral arms, it is still a puzzle and has not been well constrained from observations. In this work, we aim to inspect these issues by using a large catalogue of open clusters. We have compiled a catalogue of 3794 OCs based on Gaia EDR3. A majority of them have accurately determined parallaxes, proper motions and radial velocities. The age parameters for these OCs are also collected or calculated. Then, we analysed their distributions on the Galactic plane, the kinematic properties, the vertical distributions and the regressed properties of subsamples of OCs in order to better understand the nearby spiral structure and its evolution. We find evidence that the nearby spiral arms are compatible with a long lived pattern and might have remained approximately stable for the past 80 million years. Especially, the Local Arm where our Sun is currently located in, is also suggested to be long-lived in nature, and probable a major arm segment in the Milky Way. The evolutionary characteristics of nearby spiral arms show that the dynamic spiral mechanism might be not suitable for our Galaxy. Instead, the density wave theory is more consistent with the observational properties.
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