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Published October 5, 2025 | Version v1
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Dormant BH candidates from Gaia DR3 summary diagnostics -- supplementary material

Authors/Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
  • 2. ROR icon Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian

Description

Candidate dormant black hole and neutron star binaries identified using summary statistics from Gaia DR3.

Here, we provide the results from applying our forward-modelling framework of Gaia summary diagnostics to stars showing excess scatter in RV and position in DR3. For all candidates, we inferred posterior distributions for companion mass and orbital period by simulating and fitting Gaia observables, in particular the renormalised unit weight error (ruwe) and radial velocity (RV) scatter, marginalising over nuisance orbital parameters.

The sample is split into two catalogues; the main catalogue of 21,028 RGB stars and the supplementary catalogue of 19,664 MS stars. 

Each catalogue contains the inferred orbital periods and companion masses and quality flags to filter unreliable sources, as explained in more detail in Müller-Horn et al. (2025). The subset of the most promising BH canididates can be selected by requiring fit_companion_mass > 3.0 and flag_quality == True, yielding 556 RGB+BH candidates and 279 MS+BH candidates, respectively.

For all stars, we include the most relevant Gaia DR3 data as well as the assumed primary star masses and radii.

Parameter

Description

Fundamental Parameters

  
designation Gaia DR3 designation
source_id Gaia DR3 source identifier
ra, dec Gaia DR3 right ascension and declination (deg)
parallax, parallax_error Gaia DR3 parallax and uncertainty (mas)
pmra, pmdec Gaia DR3 propoer motion in right ascension and declination (mas/yr)
phot_g_mean_mag Gaia DR3 G-band magnitude
phot_g_mean_flux_over_error Gaia DR3 G-band mean flux divided by its error
phot_g_n_obs Gaia DR3 number of observations contributing to G photometry
phot_bp_mean_mag Gaia DR3 BP-band magnitude
phot_rp_mean_mag Gaia DR3 RP-band magnitude
ruwe Gaia DR3 renormalised unit weight error
rv_amplitude_robust Gaia DR3 total amplitude in the radial velocity time series after outlier removal (km/s)
radial_velocity, radial_velocity_error Gaia DR3 radial velocity and uncertainty (km/s)
rv_nb_transits Gaia DR3 number of transits used to compute the radial velocity
mass

Primary star mass (solar mass)

  • for RGB stars: inferred from XGBoost inference
  • for MS stars: SED based, from Li et al. 2025 
radius

Primary star radius (solar radius)

  • for RGB stars: inferred from XGBoost inference
  • for MS stars: isochrone radius, based on Li et al. 2025 

Results from binary model fit of summary diagnostics

  
fit_period, fit_period_errup, fit_period_errlow Binary orbital period and uncertainties (days)
fit_companion_mass, fit_companion_mass_errup, fit_companion_mass_errlow Companion mass and uncertainties (solar mass)
fit_cosi, fit_cosi_err Cosine of orbital inclination and uncertainty

Quality flags

  
mass_significance Fraction of posterior weight for companion mass exceeding three solar masses
flag_rv Star removed as RV outlier? (Boolean)
flag_parx Star removed because of unreliable parallax? (Boolean)
flag_phot Star removed because of photometric variability? (Boolean)
flag_nss Star removed becasue of existing NSS orbital solution? (Boolean)
flag_quality Whether star remains in final cleaned sample. (Boolean)

 

Files

MS+BH_candidates_from_GaiaDR3_summary_diagnostics.csv

Files (19.0 MB)