984 research outputs found
The Magellanic Bridge: The Nearest Purely Tidal Stellar Population
We report on observations of the stellar populations in twelve fields
spanning the region between the Magellanic Clouds, made with the Mosaic-II
camera on the 4-meter telescope at the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
The two main goals of the observations are to characterize the young stellar
population (which presumably formed in situ in the Bridge and therefore
represents the nearest stellar population formed from tidal debris), and to
search for an older stellar component (which would have been stripped from
either Cloud as stars, by the same tidal forces which formed the gaseous
Bridge). We determine the star-formation history of the young inter-Cloud
population, which provides a constraint on the timing of the gravitational
interaction which formed the Bridge. We do not detect an older stellar
population belonging to the Bridge in any of our fields, implying that the
material that was stripped from the Clouds to form the Magellanic Bridge was
very nearly a pure gas.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures. Accepted to Ap
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