Bibcode
Rix, H.-W.; Carrera, R.; Dolphin, A.; Noël, N. E. D.; Conn, B. C.; Read, J. I.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 452, Issue 4, p.4222-4235
Advertised on:
10
2015
Citations
36
Refereed citations
34
Description
The origin of the gas in between the Magellanic Clouds (MCs), known as
the Magellanic Bridge, has always been the subject of controversy. To
shed light into this, we present the results from the MAGellanic
Inter-Cloud II (MAGIC II) project aimed at probing the stellar
populations in 10 large fields located perpendicular to the main
ridge-line of H I in the Inter-Cloud region. We secured these
observations of the stellar populations in between the MCs using the WFI
(Wide Field Imager) camera on the 2.2 m telescope in La Silla. Using
colour-magnitude diagrams, we trace stellar populations across the
Inter-Cloud region. In good agreement with MAGIC I, we find significant
intermediate-age stars in the Inter-Cloud region as well as young stars
of a similar age to the last pericentre passage in between the MCs
(˜200 Myr ago). We show here that the young, intermediate-age and
old stars have distinct spatial distributions. The young stars correlate
well with the H I gas suggesting that they were either recently stripped
from the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) or formed in situ. The bulk of
intermediate-age stars are located mainly in the Bridge region where the
H I column density is higher, but they are more spread out than the
young stars. They have very similar properties to stars located ˜2
kpc from the SMC centre, suggesting that they were tidally stripped from
this region. Finally, the old stars extend to some 8 kpc from the SMC
supporting the idea that all galaxies have a large extended metal-poor
stellar halo.