A search for star clusters in the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud: indication of clusters in the age gap

Abstract

The YMCA (Yes, Magellanic Clouds Again) and STEP ({The SMC in Time: Evolution of a Prototype interacting late-type dwarf galaxy) projects are deep g,i photometric surveys carried out with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and devoted to study the outskirts of the Magellanic System. A main goal of YMCA and STEP is to identify candidate stellar clusters and complete their census out to the outermost regions of the Magellanic Clouds. We adopted a specific over-density search technique coupled with a visual inspection of the color magnitude diagrams (CMDs) to select the best candidates and estimate their ages. To date, we analysed a region of 23 sq. deg. in the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud, detecting 85 candidate cluster candidates, 16 of which have estimated ages falling in the so called "age gap". We use these objects together with literature data to gain insight into the formation and interaction history of the Magellanic Clouds.

38 pages, 26 figures, accepted for publications in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Discovery of an Ultra-Faint Stellar System near the Magellanic Clouds with the DECam Local Volume Exploration (DELVE) Survey
• The Second Data Release of the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH)
• STEP Survey II: Structural Analysis of 170 star clusters in the SMC
• Rubin Observatory LSST Stars Milky Way and Local Volume Star Clusters Roadmap
• A genuine Large Magellanic Cloud age gap star cluster
• YMCA-1: a new remote star cluster of the Milky Way?
• Detailed Chemical Abundances of Star Clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Astrophysical properties of newly discovered Magellanic Cloud star clusters
• Revisiting newly Large Magellanic Cloud age gap star clusters
• KMHK 1762: Another star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud age gap
• Chemo-Dynamical Tagging in the Outskirts: The Origins of Stellar Substructures in the Magellanic Clouds
• Deep VLT photometry of the faint stellar system in the Large Magellanic Cloud periphery YMCA-1
• The YMCA (Yes, Magellanic Clouds Again) survey: probing the outer regions of the Magellanic system with VST