Discovery of a loose star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud

A.E. PIATTI

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2016 vol. 459 p. 61 - 65

0035-8711

We present results for an up-to-date uncatalogued star cluster projectedtowards the Eastern side of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) outer disc.The new object was discovered from a search of loose star cluster in theMagellanic Clouds´ (MCs) outskirts using kernel density estimators on Washington$CT_1$ deep images. Contrarily to what would be commonly expected, thestar cluster resulted to be a young object (log($t$ yr$^{-1}$) = 8.45) witha slightly subsolar metal content ($Z$ = 0.013) and a total mass of 650$msun$.Its core, half-mass and tidal radii also are within the frequent values ofLMC star clusters.However, the new star cluster is placed at the Small Magellanic Cloud distance and at 11.3 kpc from the LMC centre. We speculate with the possibility thatit was born in the inner body of the LMC and soon after expeled into the intergalactic space during the recent Milky Way/MCs interaction.Nevertheless,radial velocity and chemicalabundance measurements are needed to further understand its origin, as well asextensive search for loose star cluster in order to constrain the effectiveness ofstar cluster scattering during galaxy interactions.