SURVEYING THE AGENTS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION IN THE TIDALLY STRIPPED, LOW METALLICITY SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD (SAGE-SMC). I. OVERVIEW

By K. Gordon, M. Meixner, M. Meade, B. Whitney, C. Engelbracht, C. Bot, M. Boyer, B. Lawton, M. Sewiło, Mr. Brian L. Babler and 50 more. 2011

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) provides a unique laboratory for the study of the lifecycle of dust given its low metallicity (∼1/5 solar) and relative proximity (∼60 kpc). This motivated the SAGE-SMC (Surveying the Agents of Galaxy Evolution in the Tidally Stripped, Low Metallicity Small Magellanic Cloud) Spitzer Legacy program with the specific goals of studying the amount and type of dust in the present interstellar medium, the sources of dust in the winds of evolved stars, and how much dust is consumed in star formation. This program mapped the full SMC (30 deg2) including the body, wing, and tail in seven bands from 3.6 to 160 μm using IRAC and MIPS on the Spitzer Space Telescope. The data were reduced and mosaicked, and the point sources were measured using customized routines specific for large surveys. We have made the resulting mosaics and point-source catalogs available to the community. The infrared colors of the SMC are compared to those of other nearby galaxies and the 8 μm/24 μm ratio is somewhat lower than the average and the 70 μm/160 μm ratio is somewhat higher than the average. The global infrared spectral energy distribution (SED) shows that the SMC has approximately 1/3 the aromatic emission/polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon abundance of most nearby galaxies. Infrared color–magnitude diagrams are given illustrating the distribution of different asymptotic giant branch stars and the locations of young stellar objects. Finally, the average SED of H ii/star formation regions is compared to the equivalent Large Magellanic Cloud average H ii/star formation region SED. These preliminary results will be expanded in detail in subsequent papers.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b06bfd687a99a1c7dae5097b904b475b098a2afc

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Citations in the corpus

MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, methodology): “…LFs are constructed using photometric catalogs of cool, evolved stars in the Magellanic Clouds from the Surveying the Agents of Galaxy Evolution (SAGE)-SMC and LMC surveys (private communication, M. Boyer; see also Meixner et al. 2006; Gordon et al. 2011; Boyer et al. 2011 for more details).”
ANDROMEDA'S DUST (2013, methodology): “The SAGE–SMC survey (Gordon et al. 2011) was able to minimize these problems by combining images taken with very different roll angles together with custom processing techniques, but we are simply using the M31 images from Barmby et al. (2006).”
SURVEYING THE AGENTS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION IN THE TIDALLY STRIPPED, LOW METALLICITY SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD (SAGE-SMC). II. COOL EVOLVED STARS (2011, background): “See Gordon et al. (2011) for a description of the observations, data reduction, and point-source extraction.”
Constraining the thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch phase with resolved stellar populations in the Large Magellanic Cloud (2019, methodology): “…All-Sky Survey (2MASS; Nikolaev & Weinberg 2000; Cutri et al. 2003), to include the mid-infrared data from Spitzer surveys (Boyer et al. 2011; Gordon et al. 2011; Srinivasan et al. 2016); moreover, a nonnegligible fraction of the SMC field TP-AGB stars now have a spectroscopic classification…”