Investigating the age gap of star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud

• Grant number: 25/05050-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Astronomy - Stellar Astrophysics
• Principal Investigator: Beatriz Leonor Silveira Barbuy
• Grantee: Bernardo Pereira Lima Ferreira
• Host Institution: Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas (IAG). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/15245-2 - The multi-object spectrograph (MOSAIC) for the extremely large telescope: spectroscopy of stellar populations in the milky way and external galaxies, AP.ESP

Abstract

Among the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Could (GNM, or LMC) is the most massive, and together with the Small Magellanic Cloud (PNM, or SMC), constitute the closest binary system of interacting galaxies. GNM has a distinct characteristic, which is the absence of stars clusters of intermediate age, in the range around 4 Gyr, among thousands of them.This phenomenon raises questioning about the chemical and dynamical evolution of the GNM,including interactions with the PNM, as well as its star formation history. Additionally, there are several open questions regarding the star clusters in the age gap, as for example their mass, typically smaller than the other age range clusters, or about their origin, that could have taken place inside the GNM, or else externally.Despite all these questions, the work on these objects deal more often on discovery of new suchclusters, and not much is ound on the origin of the problem. For this reason, we propose to investigate the origin of these clusters, using high quality photometric data that we have been gathering in the VISCACHA survey, a successful project led by our brazilian team at the SOAR telescope. We intend also to validate or improve derivations of age, metallicity, distance and mass of these clusters, and as well their structural parameters, dynamics and mass function, trying to find signs of dissolution. Besides, we will look for new star clusters in this age range within our survey. Furthermore, we should be part of the continued survey, planning new observations with deeper photometry, needed to study mass function of the older objects, as well as low-resolution spectroscopy to derive radial velocities and metallicities, and high resolution spectroscopy to derive chemical abundances. The aim is to characterize observationally all the intermediate age clusters, trying to better understand their origin and evolution. (AU)