Ages, metallicities and structure of stellar clusters in the Magellanic Bridge

Raphael A. P. Oliveira, Francisco F. S. Maia, Beatriz Barbuy, Bruno Dias, the VISCACHA collaboration

Published 2023-07-11Version 1

The formation of the Magellanic Bridge during an encounter between the Magellanic Clouds $\sim$200 Myr ago would be imprinted in the chemical evolution and kinematics of its stellar population, with sites of active star formation. Since it contains hundreds of stellar clusters and associations, we combined deep photometry from VISCACHA and SMASH surveys to explore this topic, by deriving structural parameters, age, metallicity, distance and mass for 33 Bridge clusters with robust statistical tools. We identified a group of 13 clusters probably stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud (0.5$-$6.8 Gyr, $\rm{[Fe/H]} < -0.6$ dex) and another 15 probably formed in-situ ($<$200 Myr, $\rm{[Fe/H]}\sim-0.4$ dex). Two metallicity dips were detected in the age-metallicity relation, coeval to the Stream and Bridge formation epochs. Cluster masses range from 500 to $\sim 10^4 M_\odot$, and a new estimate of $3-5\times 10^5 M_\odot$ is obtained for the Bridge stellar mass.