Speaker
Description
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the nearest, gas-rich interacting dwarf satellites of the Milky Way and the companion of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The interactions with the LMC and/or with the Milky Way play a significant role in the evolution of the SMC. With its widespread star formation and low metallicity, the SMC is one of the best test beds to study star formation and evolution in a tidally driven environment. The shell region located in the North-East outskirt of SMC is a tidally affected region where there has been recent star formation. Our aim is to understand the spatial distribution, age dating, and kinematics of the young population in this part of the tidally affected SMC disk.
We obtained far-UV (FUV) images of eleven fields in the North-East SMC Shell region using the UltraViolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) on AstroSat. We created science-ready images and performed PSF photometry. We cross-matched the detected FUV stars with the Gaia EDR3 data and eliminated foreground stars to create an FUV catalog of a few thousand stars. We created FUV-optical color-magnitude diagrams and estimated the ages of the stellar population using isochrones to map the morphology, density, and tidal features of stars younger than ∼ 600 Myr. The identified episodes of star formation are used to constrain the details of the recent interaction of the SMC with the LMC. We also estimated the dispersion in the proper motion of the young and old stars to explore the kinematics of the North-East part of the outer SMC disk.
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