The Magellanic Squall: Gas Replenishment from the Small to Large Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

We first show that a large amount of metal-poor gas is stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and fallen into the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) during the tidal interaction between the SMC, the LMC, and the Galaxy over the last 2 Gyrs. We propose that this metal-poor gas can closely be associated with the origin of LMC's young and intermediate-age stars and star clusters with distinctively low-metallicities with [Fe/H] < -0.6. We numerically investigate whether gas initially in the outer part of the SMC's gas disk can be stripped during the LMC-SMC-Galaxy interaction and consequently can pass through the central region (R<7.5 kpc) of the LMC. We find that about 0.7 % and 18 % of the SMC's gas can pass through the central region of the LMC about 1.3 Gyr ago and 0.2 Gyr ago, respectively. The possible mean metallicity of the replenished gas from the SMC to LMC is about [Fe/H] = -0.9 to -1.0 for the two interacting phases. These results imply that the LMC can temporarily replenish gas supplies through the sporadic accretion and infall of metal-poor gas from the SMC. These furthermore imply that if these gas from the SMC can collide with gas in the LMC to form new stars in the LMC, the metallicities of the stars can be significantly lower than those of stars formed from gas initially within the LMC.

5 pages, 5 figures, accepted in MNRAS Letters

References in corpus (3)

• Is the SMC Bound to the LMC? The HST Proper Motion of the SMC
• Calcium II Triplet Spectroscopy of LMC Red Giants. I. Abundances and Velocities for a Sample of Populous Clusters
• Dynamical Influences of the Last Magellanic Interaction On the Magellanic Clouds

Cited by in corpus (14)

• The Chemical Enrichment History of the Large Magellanic Cloud
• The VMC Survey. XIII. Type II Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Metallicity and Physical Conditions in the Magellanic Bridge
• The VMC survey - XV. The Small Magellanic Cloud--Bridge connection history as traced by their star cluster populations
• The Magellanic Inter-Cloud Project (MAGIC) III: First spectroscopic evidence of a dwarf stripping a dwarf
• STEP: The VST survey of the SMC and the Magellanic Bridge. I. Overview and first results
• Topology of Neutral Hydrogen Within the Small Magellanic Cloud
• Disk of the Small Magellanic Cloud as traced by Cepheids
• Tagging the Chemical Evolution History of the Large Magellanic Cloud Disk
• Formation of the Small Magellanic Cloud: ancient major merger as a solution to the kinematical differences between old stars and HI gas
• Origin of structural and kinematical properties of the Small Magellanic Cloud
• Herschel spectroscopy of Massive Young Stellar Objects in the Magellanic Clouds
• Extinction and dust/gas ratio in the H I ridge region of the LMC based on the IRSF/SIRIUS near-infrared survey
• The Magellanic impact: Collision between the outer Galactic HI disk and the leading arms of the Magellanic stream