Abstract Details

Name: Prolay
Affiliation: Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore
Conference ID: ASI2017_1312
Title : Recent star formation in the Magellanic Bridge
Authors and Co-Authors : Annapurni Subramaniam,Prasanta Kumar Nayak, Chayan Mondal, Snehalata Sahu. (Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore)
Abstract Type : Poster
Abstract Category : Extragalactic astronomy
Abstract : The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) are two irregular galaxies orbiting around the Milky Way with distances 60 Kpc and 50 Kpc respectively. The Magellanic Bridge consisting of gas and stars connect the LMC and the SMC, which are thought to be stripped from the SMC during the last LMC-SMC interaction about 250 Myr ago. There have been suggestions of star formation in the stripped gas in the bridge. We have used the UV data from GALEX observations of the Magellanic Bridge to age date the star formation in the last 200 Myr. We generated extinction and reddening corrected UV color-magnitude diagram using FUV magnitude against (FUV-NUV) color. We have compared these with the theoretical isochrones produced using the Flexible Stellar Population Synthesis (FSPS) model by adopting the SMC metallicity. We divided the observed area into several sub-regions and created density as well as an age map of the bridge. We identify pockets of very recent star formation and we discuss the possible mechanisms for the star formation trigger.