Multiple Stellar Populations in Three Rich Large Magellanic Cloud Star Clusters
By A. Mackey, P. Broby Nielsen, A. Ferguson, J. Richardson. 2008
154 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present deep color-magnitude diagrams for three rich intermediate-age star clusters in the LMC, constructed from archival ACS F435W and F814W imaging. All three clusters exhibit clear evidence for peculiar main-sequence turnoffs. NGC 1846 and 1806 each possess two distinct turnoff branches, while the turnoff for NGC 1783 shows a much larger spread in color than can be explained by the photometric uncertainties. We demonstrate that although all three clusters contain significant populations of unresolved binary stars, these cannot be the underlying cause of the observed turnoff morphologies. The simplest explanation is that each cluster is composed of at least two different stellar populations with very similar metal abundances but ages separated by up to ~300 Myr. The origin of these unusual properties remains unidentified; however, the fact that at least three massive clusters containing multiple stellar populations are now known in the LMC suggests a potentially significant formation channel.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e08cecfcaf9e139a4e62c9c0f9f5c39f2d12d21
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Citations in the corpus
- Multiple stellar populations in Magellanic Cloud clusters - I. An ordinary feature for intermediate age globulars in the LMC? (2008, background): “…electronic form at http://www.aanda.org and NGC 6388 (Piotto 2008), also in some intermediate-age Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) clusters (Bertelli et al. 2003; Mackey & Broby Nielsen 2007 [M07]; Mackey et al. 2008 [M08]) and in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) cluster NGC 419 (Glatt et al. 2008a).”
- AGE DETERMINATION OF SIX INTERMEDIATE-AGE SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD STAR CLUSTERS WITH HST/ACS (2008, unknown): “Mackey et al. (2008) (see also Mackey & Broby Nielsen 2007) discovered the only two star clusters in the LMC known to have a double MS, NGC 1846 and NGC 1806, which both have similar metallicities of about Z = 0.0075.”
- Properties of stellar generations in globular clusters and relations with global parameters (2010, background): “This is possibly the case of the Antennae (Whitmore & Schweizer 1995) or even of the Magellanic Clouds, where there is evidence of formation of six young clusters in the Magellanic Bridge (Irwin et al. 1985).”
- The Dawes Review 2: Nucleosynthesis and Stellar Yields of Low- and Intermediate-Mass Single Stars (2014, background): “…in the Magellanic Clouds in particular prove very valuable as they span a wide range of age, which enables us to study the evolution of stars with masses around 1.5 to 5M⊙ (e.g. Girardi et al. 1995, 2009; Maceroni et al. 2002; Mucciarelli et al. 2006; Mackey et al. 2008; Milone et al. 2009).”
- The Effect of Stellar Rotation on Colour-Magnitude Diagrams: On the apparent presence of multiple populations in intermediate age stellar clusters (2009, background): “Of particular interest has been the discovery that intermediate age (1-2 Gyr) clusters in the Magellanic Clouds often have bi- or multi-modal distributions in their main-sequence turn-off (Mackey & Broby Nielsen 2007; Mackey et al. 2008; Glatt et al. 2008; Milone et al. 2009).”
- The second and third parameters of the horizontal branch in globular clusters (2010, background): “…detailed spectroscopic data for stars in massive and very young clusters, such as RSGC1 and RSGC2 (Davies et al. 2007), or intermediate age clusters in the LMC, where multiple MS TO’s have been observed (Mackey et al. 2008; Milone et al. 2009), may provide a crucial test of this scenario.”