TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE PICTURE OF THE STAR CLUSTER AGE-MATELLICITY RELATIONSHIP IN THE SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD

PIATTI, ANDRÉS E.

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Año: 2011 vol. 418 p. 69 - 73

0035-8711

We present the results on the age and metallicity estimates of 11 Small Magellanic Cloud(SMC) clusters obtained from CCD Washington CT 1 T 2 photometry. The 11 clusters repro-duce the ∼2 Gyr bursting formation paradigm when entering them into the age–metallicityrelationship (AMR). Once these clusters were added to the largest known SMC cluster samplewith ages and metallicities put into an homogeneous scale, we found that a comprehensivepicture of the cluster AMR can be obtained, which includes the following components: twoenhanced formation processes at t ∼ 2 and 5–6 Gyr, which have taken place throughout theentire body of the galaxy; the absent of a metallicity gradient and a relative spread in metallic-ity for clusters older than ∼7 Gyr. Furthermore, such picture should not significantly changedue to incompleteness in the number of studied clusters. Indeed, based on the statistics ofcatalogued and studied clusters, we found that a total of seven relatively old/old clusters havenot yet studied, and even a smaller number is obtained if the cluster spatial distribution isconsidered.