Metallicities and ages for star clusters and their surrounding fields in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

We study 147 star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in order to determine their mean metallicities and ages, as well as the mean metallicities of 80 surrounding fields. We construct an age-metallicity relation (AMR) for the clusters in the LMC. For this purpose, we used Strömgren photometry obtained with the SOI camera on the 4.1 m SOAR telescope. We found the mean metallicity and age for 110 star clusters. For the remaining 37, we provide an age estimation only. To the best of our knowledge, for 29 clusters from our sample, we provide both the metallicity and age for the first time, whereas for 66 clusters, we provide a first determination of the metallicity, and for 43 clusters, the first estimation of the age. We also calculated the mean metallicities for stars from 80 fields around the clusters. The old, metal-poor star clusters occur both in and out of the LMC bar region, while intermediate-age clusters are located mostly outside of the bar. The majority of star clusters younger than 1 Gyr are located in the bar region. We find a good agreement between our AMR and theoretical models of the LMC chemical enrichment, as well as with AMRs for clusters from the literature. Next, we took advantage of 26 stellar clusters from our sample which host Cepheid variables and used them as an independent check of the correctness of our age determination procedure. We used period-age relations for Cepheids to calculate the mean age of a given cluster and compared it with the age obtained from isochrone fitting. We find good agreement between these ages, especially for models taking into account additional physical processes (e.g., rotation). We also compared the AMR of the LMC and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) derived in a uniform way and we note that they indicate possible former interaction between these two galaxies.

40 pages, 17 figures, 6 tables, Published in A&A; The 8th (last) column in Table A.1 has been corrected compared to the published version

References in corpus (28)

• The Gaia mission
• The Dartmouth Stellar Evolution Database
• A distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud that is precise to one per cent
• Constraining the thermally-pulsing asymptotic giant branch phase with resolved stellar populations in the Small Magellanic Cloud
• The chemical composition of red giant stars in four intermediate-age clusters of the Large Magellanic Cloud
• The Chemical Enrichment History of the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Age as a Major Factor in the Onset of Multiple Populations in Stellar Clusters
• On the effect of rotation on populations of classical Cepheids I. Predictions at solar metallicity
• A high fraction of Be stars in young massive clusters: evidence for a large population of near-critically rotating stars
• No Evidence for Significant Age Spreads in Young Massive LMC Clusters
• Multiple stellar populations in Magellanic Cloud clusters. V. The split main sequence of the young cluster NGC1866
• Cepheid Mass-loss and the Pulsation -- Evolutionary Mass Discrepancy
• Stroemgren photometry of Galactic Globular Clusters. I. New Calibrations of the metallicity index
• Physical parameters of 15 intermediate-age LMC clusters from modelling of HST colour-magnitude diagrams
• The search for multiple populations in Magellanic Clouds clusters - V. Correlation between cluster age and abundance spreads
• Empirical calibration of the reddening maps in the Magellanic Clouds
• The VMC survey -- XLIV: Mapping metallicity trends in the Large Magellanic Cloud using near-infrared passbands
• On the Iron content of NGC 1978 in the LMC: a metal rich, chemically homogeneous cluster
• Dynamical masses and mass-to-light ratios of resolved massive star clusters -- II. Results for 26 star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds
• Detailed chemical composition of classical Cepheids in the LMC cluster NGC 1866 and in the field of the SMC
• Period-Age-Metallicity and Period-Age-Color-Metallicity relations for Classical Cepheids: an application to the Gaia EDR3 sample
• Metallicity estimates of young clusters in the Magellanic Clouds from Stromgren photometry of supergiant stars
• On the Nitrogen variation in ~2 Gyr old massive star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• A genuine Large Magellanic Cloud age gap star cluster
• A ground-based proper motion study of twelve nearby Globular Clusters
• Probing the Large Magellanic Cloud's recent chemical enrichment history through its star clusters
• Astrophysical properties of newly discovered Magellanic Cloud star clusters
• Extinction in the Large Magellanic Cloud Bar around NGC1854, NGC1856, and NGC1858

Cited by in corpus (11)

• JWST/NIRCam Probes Young Star Clusters in the Reionization Era Sunrise Arc
• Star formation at the smallest scales; A JWST study of the clump populations in SMACS0723
• JWST-TST Proper Motions: I. High-Precision NIRISS Calibration and Large Magellanic Cloud Kinematics
• Predictions of a simple parametric model of hierarchical black hole mergers
• Photometric metallicity for 694233 Galactic giant stars from Gaia DR3 synthetic Stromgren photometry. Metallicity distribution functions of halo sub-structures
• A comprehensive kinematic model of the LMC disk from star clusters and field stars using Gaia DR3: Tracing the disk characteristics, rotation, bar, and the outliers
• VFTS 243 as predicted by the BPASS fiducial models
• An ongoing tidal capture in the Large Magellanic Cloud: the low-mass star cluster KMK88-10 captured by the massive globular cluster NGC 1835?
• GAMA 526784: the progenitor of a globular cluster-rich ultra-diffuse galaxy? I. Star clusters, stellar body and ionised gas properties
• Strömgren photometric metallicity map of the Magellanic Cloud stars using Gaia DR3--XP spectra
• Hubble Space Telescope proper motions of Large Magellanic Cloud star clusters -- II. Kinematic structure of young and intermediate-age clusters