Recognizing new stellar clusters \\in the Magellanic System

A.E. PIATTI

Memoria della societa astronomica italiana

M. Cignoni, M. Di Criscienzo and A. Milone

Año: 2018 vol. 89 p. 90 - 94

The adventure of catching up with new stellar clusters in theMagellanic System has been recently fueled from the ongoing relatively deepand extensive photometric surveys. Particularly, the presence of stellarclusters in the periphery of the Magellanic Clouds and beyond is currentlyan exciting issue. We present here a review of recently discovered stellar clusters in the Magellanic System. Particularly, we focus on the use of awealth of wide-field high-quality images released in advance from the Magellanic Stellar History (SMASH) survey. We conducted a sound search for new stellar cluster candidates using suitable kernel density estimators forappropriate ranges of radii and stellar densities. In addition, we used afunctional relationship to account for the completeness of the SMASH fieldsample analysed that takes into account not only the number of fields observedbut also their particular spatial distribution; the present samplestatistically represents about 50 per cent of the whole SMASH survey. Therelative small number of new stellar cluster candidates identified in thissurvey, most of them distributed in the outer regions of the MagellanicClouds, might suggest that the lack of detection of a larger number of newcluster candidates beyond the main bodies of the MCs could likely be theoutcome once the SMASH survey is completed.