Star Formation History of the Small Magellanic Cloud: the shell substructure [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02755


We present the spatially resolved star formation history (SFH) of a shell-like structure located in the northeastern Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We quantitatively obtain the SFH using unprecedented deep photometric data (g~24 magnitude) from the SMASH survey and colour-magnitude diagram (CMD) fitting techniques. We consider, for the first time, the SMC’s line-of-sight depth and its optical effects on the CMDs. The SFH presents higher accuracy when a line-of-sight depth of ~3 Kpc is simulated. We find young star formation enhancements at ~150 Myr, ~200 Myr, ~450 Myr, ~650 Myr, and ~1 Gyr. Comparing the shell’s SFH with the Large Magellanic Cloud’s (LMC) northern arm SFH we show strong evidence of synchronicity from at least the past ~2.8 Gyr and, possibly, the past ~3.5 Gyr. Our results place constraints on the orbital history of the Magellanic Clouds which, potentially, have implications on their dynamical mass estimates.

Read this paper on arXiv…

J. Sakowska, N. Noël, T. Ruiz-Lara, et. al.
Fri, 5 May 23
2/67

Comments: 4 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to the Proceedings of IAU Symposium 379: Dynamical Masses of Local Group Galaxies