Comoving stars in Gaia DR1

This increased astrometric precision presents an opportunity to find new binary stars and moving groups. We search for high-confidence comoving pairs of stars in TGAS by identifying pairs of stars consistent with having the same 3D velocity using a marginalized likelihood ratio test to discriminate candidate comoving pairs from the field population.

Although we perform some visualizations using (bias-corrected) inverse parallax as a point estimate of distance, the likelihood ratio is computed with a probabilistic model that includes the covariances of parallax and proper motions and marginalizes the (unknown) true distances and 3D velocities of the stars. We find 13085 comoving star pairs among 10606 unique stars with separations as large as 10pc (our search limit).