English

Ages, metallicities and structure of stellar clusters in the Magellanic Bridge

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-01-14 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

The formation of the Magellanic Bridge during an encounter between the Magellanic Clouds \sim200 Myr ago would be imprinted in the chemical evolution and kinematics of its stellar population, with sites of active star formation. Since it contains hundreds of stellar clusters and associations, we combined deep photometry from VISCACHA and SMASH surveys to explore this topic, by deriving structural parameters, age, metallicity, distance and mass for 33 Bridge clusters with robust statistical tools. We identified a group of 13 clusters probably stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud (0.5-6.8 Gyr, [Fe/H]<0.6\rm{[Fe/H]} < -0.6 dex) and another 15 probably formed in-situ (<<200 Myr, [Fe/H]0.4\rm{[Fe/H]}\sim-0.4 dex). Two metallicity dips were detected in the age-metallicity relation, coeval to the Stream and Bridge formation epochs. Cluster masses range from 500 to 104M\sim 10^4 M_\odot, and a new estimate of 35×105M3-5\times 10^5 M_\odot is obtained for the Bridge stellar mass.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.05690,
  title  = {Ages, metallicities and structure of stellar clusters in the Magellanic Bridge},
  author = {Raphael A. P. Oliveira and Francisco F. S. Maia and Beatriz Barbuy and Bruno Dias and the VISCACHA collaboration},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.05690},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the IAUS379 "Dynamical Masses of Local Group Galaxies"