Symbiotic star candidates in Gaia Data Release 3

Symbiotic stars, binary pairs with a cool giant fueling accretion onto a hot compact companion, offer unique insights to our understanding of stellar evolution. Yet, only a few hundred symbiotic stars are confirmed. Here, we report on a new search for symbiotic star candidates in Gaia Data Release 3 (GDR3), based entirely on the archive’s astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic information. To begin our search, we identified known symbiotic stars in GDR3 and assessed their absolute magnitude and colors, which are dominated by the cool giant. We also considered measures of astrometric quality that might be affected by binary motion in these systems. Finally, from those sources with Gaia spectroscopic data, we built a low-resolution spectral template that characterizes the unique features of these systems, including H <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>α</mml:mi> </mml:math> emission from interaction with the giant’s wind and radiation from the hot star. We then queried the full GDR3 archive for sources with spectroscopic data that are bright (&lt; 17 mag in G-band), have modest relative parallax uncertainties (&lt; 20%), and fall within a region of color-magnitude space characteristic of red giants, keeping only sources with spectra that quantitatively match our template. A machine-learning algorithm, trained on known symbiotic stars, produced a new catalog of 1,674 sources. From cross-matches with infrared and X-ray surveys, we present 25 of these sources as particularly compelling candidates for new symbiotic stars.