The star cluster frequency throughout the Large Magellanic Cloud

A.E. PIATTI

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2014 vol. 437 p. 1646 - 1661

0035-8711

We address the issue about the variation of the star cluster frequency (CF) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in terms of the cluster spatial distribution. We adopted theLMC regions traced by Harris & Zaritsky shortcite{hz09} and used an updated version of the cluster database compiled by Baumgardt et al. shortcite{betal13}. The CFs were produced by taking into account an appropriate selection of age bins. Since the uncertainty in a cluster´s age can be large compared to the size of the age bins, we account for the fact that acluster could actually reside in one of a few adjacent age bins. We confirm that there exist some variations of the LMC CFs in terms of their spatial distributions, although some caveats should bepointed out. 30 Doradus resulted to be the region with the highest relative frequency of youngestclusters, while the log($t$) = 9-9.5 (1-3 Gyr) age range is featured by cluster formation at a higher rate in the inner regions than in the outer ones. We compared the observed CFs to theoretical CFs, which are based on the star formation histories of the field stars in each regionof the LMC, and found the former predicting more or fewer clusters than observed depending on thefield and age range considered.