Revisiting newly Large Magellanic Cloud age gap star clusters
arXiv:2102.03601 · doi:10.3847/1538-3881/abe545
Abstract
Recently, a noticeable number of new star clusters was identified in the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) populating the so-called star cluster age gap, a space of time (~ 4-12 Gyr) where the only known star cluster is up-to-date ESO121-SC\,03. We used Survey of the Magellanic Stellar History (SMASH) DR2 data sets, as well as those employed to identify these star cluster candidates, to produce relatively deep color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of 17 out of 20 discovered age gap star clusters with the aim of investigating them in detail. Our analysis relies on a thorough CMD cleaning procedure of the field star contamination, which presents variations in its stellar density and astrophysical properties, such as luminosity and effective temperature, around the star cluster fields. We built star cluster CMDs from stars with membership probabilities assigned from the cleaning procedure. These CMDs and their respective spatial distribution maps favor the existence of LMC star field density fluctuations rather than age gap star clusters, although a definitive assessment on them will be possible from further deeper photometry.
9 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal
References in corpus (12)
- The Gaia mission
- Clustering of Local Group distances: publication bias or correlated measurements? I. The Large Magellanic Cloud
- The Magellanic Corona and the formation of the Magellanic Stream
- The VISCACHA survey - I. Overview and First Results
- STEP: The VST survey of the SMC and the Magellanic Bridge. I. Overview and first results
- The Second Data Release of the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH)
- Star cluster formation history along the minor axis of the Large Magellanic Cloud
- Two kinematically distinct old globular cluster populations in the Large Magellanic Cloud
- Detection of a diffuse extended halo-like structure around 47 Tuc
- Stellar cluster candidates discovered in the Magellanic System
- A novel method to automatically detect and measure the ages of star clusters in nearby galaxies: Application to the Large Magellanic Cloud
- Towards a comprehensive knowledge of the open cluster Haffner 9