THE STAR FORMATION HISTORY OF THE LARGE MAGELLANIC CLOUD

By J. Harris, Dennis Zaritsky. 2009

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We present the first ever global, spatially resolved reconstruction of the star formation history (SFH) of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), based on the application of our StarFISH analysis software to the multiband photometry of 20 million of its stars from the Magellanic Clouds Photometric Survey. The general outlines of our results are consistent with previously published results: following an initial burst of star formation, there was a quiescent epoch from approximately 12 to 5 Gyr ago. Star formation then resumed and has proceeded until the current time at an average rate of roughly 0.2 M☉ yr−1, with temporal variations at the factor of 2 level. The re-ignition of star formation about 5 Gyr ago, in both the LMC and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), is suggestive of a dramatic event at that time in the Magellanic system. Among the global variations in the recent star formation rate are peaks at roughly 2 Gyr, 500 Myr, 100 Myr, and 12 Myr. The peaks at 500 Myr and 2 Gyr are nearly coincident with similar peaks in the SFH of the SMC, suggesting a joint history for these galaxies extending back at least several Gyr. The chemical enrichment history recovered from our StarFISH analysis is in broad agreement with that inferred from the LMC's star cluster population, although our constraints on the ancient chemical enrichment history are weak. We conclude from the concordance between the star formation and chemical enrichment histories of the field and cluster populations that the field and cluster star formation modes are tightly coupled.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f5650f849dee6508d88b80f9cf26bb8466f1664

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Citations in the corpus

The delay-time distribution of Type Ia supernovae from Sloan II (2012, methodology): “The SN rates in individual regions of the Clouds were compared to the detailed SFH of each region, as reconstructed by Harris & Zaritsky (2004, 2009) using isochrone fitting to the resolved stellar populations.”
RECONSTRUCTING THE STELLAR MASS DISTRIBUTIONS OF GALAXIES USING S4G IRAC 3.6 AND 4.5 μm IMAGES. II. THE CONVERSION FROM LIGHT TO MASS (2014, methodology): “LMC-based calibration of Υ3.”
Type-Ia Supernova Rates and the Progenitor Problem: A Review (2011, neutral): “The Clouds have very detailed SFHs in many small individual spatial cells, obtained by Zaritsky & Harris (2004) and Harris & Zaritsky (2009), by fitting model stellar isochrones to the resolved stellar populations.”
CONVERTING FROM 3.6 AND 4.5 μm FLUXES TO STELLAR MASS (2012, methodology): “5 as proxies for M∗ in one galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), whose extinction and star formation history have been mapped in spatial detail (Zaritsky 1999; Harris & Zaritsky 2009) and that has been extensively observed with the Spitzer telescope (Meixner et al. 2006).”
SIMULATIONS OF THE MAGELLANIC STREAM IN A FIRST INFALL SCENARIO (2010, background): “There are, however, other features that require additional physics to address, such as the claim of correlated bursts of star formation in both Clouds (Harris & Zaritsky 2009).”
THIRD-EPOCH MAGELLANIC CLOUD PROPER MOTIONS. I. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/WFC3 DATA AND ORBIT IMPLICATIONS (2013, background): “LMC-SMC Binarity: Studies of the star-formation histories of the Clouds all agree on the fact that the star-formation rate started to increase ∼ 4–6 Gyr ago, and was quiescent in both galaxies before this time (Harris & Zaritsky 2009; Cignoni et al. 2012).”
Observational Clues to the Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae (2013, background): “The stellar age distributions are found by comparing the densities of the resolved stars in color-magnitude diagrams to model stellar isochrones (Harris & Zaritsky 2004, 2009).”
The role of dwarf galaxy interactions in shaping the Magellanic System and implications for Magellanic Irregulars (2012, background): “The resulting kinematics and structure of the LMC strongly favour a scenario in which the MCs have recently (100–300 Myr) experienced a direct collision (our Model 2).”
Delay-time distribution of core-collapse supernovae with late events resulting from binary interaction (2017, background): “The original study of Maoz & Badenes (2010) was limited by the spatial and time resolution of the SFH map of the Magellanic Clouds by Harris & Zaritsky (2004, 2009).”
MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, methodology): “We first convolve the isochrones with star formation and metallicity histories (SMC; Harris & Zaritsky 2004, LMC; Harris & Zaritsky 2009) to generate composite CMDs in various filters, including the effects of circumstellar dust around AGB stars that can strongly influence the flux at longer…”