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The structure and evolution of the spiral arms of our Milky Way are basic butlong-standing questions in astronomy. In particular, the lifetime of spiralarms is still a puzzle and has not been well constrained from observations. Inthis work, we aim to inspect these issues using a large catalogue of openclusters. We compiled a catalogue of 3794 open clusters based on Gaia EDR3. Amajority of these clusters have accurately determined parallaxes, propermotions, and radial velocities. The age parameters for these open clusters arecollected from references or calculated in this work. In order to understandthe nearby spiral structure and its evolution, we analysed the distributions,kinematic properties, vertical distributions, and regressed properties ofsubsamples of open clusters. We find evidence that the nearby spiral arms arecompatible with a long-lived spiral pattern and might have remainedapproximately stable for the past 80 million years. In particular, the LocalArm, where our Sun is currently located, is also suggested to be long-lived innature and probably a major arm segment of the Milky Way. The evolutionarycharacteristics of nearby spiral arms show that the dynamic spiral mechanismmight be not prevalent for our Galaxy. Instead, density wave theory is moreconsistent with the observational properties of open clusters.

Evolution of the local spiral structure of the Milky Way revealed by open clusters