BANYAN II. Nearby young assoc. candidate members

In addition to using kinematic information (from sky position and proper motion), this analysis exploits 2MASS-WISE color-magnitude diagrams in which old and young objects follow distinct sequences. As an improvement over our earlier work (Malo+, 2013, J/ApJ/762/88), the spatial and kinematic distributions for each association are now modeled as ellipsoids whose axes need not be aligned with the Galactic coordinate axes, and we use prior probabilities matching the expected populations of the NYAs considered versus field stars.

We present an extensive contamination analysis to characterize the performance of our new method. We find that Bayesian probabilities are generally representative of contamination rates, except when a parallax measurement is considered. In this case contamination rates become significantly smaller and hence Bayesian probabilities for NYA memberships are pessimistic.