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SMASH - Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History

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 نشر من قبل David Nidever
 تاريخ النشر 2017
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) are unique local laboratories for studying the formation and evolution of small galaxies in exquisite detail. The Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH) is an NOAO community DECam survey of the Clouds mapping 480 square degrees (distributed over ~2400 square degrees at ~20% filling factor) to ~24th mag in ugriz with the goal of identifying broadly distributed, low surface brightness stellar populations associated with the stellar halos and tidal debris of the Clouds. SMASH will also derive spatially-resolved star formation histories covering all ages out to large radii from the MCs that will further complement our understanding of their formation. Here, we present a summary of the survey, its data reduction, and a description of the first public Data Release (DR1). The SMASH DECam data have been reduced with a combination of the NOAO Community Pipeline, PHOTRED, an automated PSF photometry pipeline based mainly on the DAOPHOT suite, and custom calibration software. The attained astrometric precision is ~15 mas and the accuracy is ~2 mas with respect to the Gaia DR1 astrometric reference frame. The photometric precision is ~0.5-0.7% in griz and ~1% in u with a calibration accuracy of ~1.3% in all bands. The median 5 sigma point source depths in ugriz bands are 23.9, 24.8, 24.5, 24.2, 23.5 mag. The SMASH data already have been used to discover the Hydra II Milky Way satellite, the SMASH 1 old globular cluster likely associated with the LMC, and very extended stellar populations around the LMC out to R~18.4 kpc. SMASH DR1 contains measurements of ~100 million objects distributed in 61 fields. A prototype version of the NOAO Data Lab provides data access, including a data discovery tool, SMASH database access, an image cutout service, and a Jupyter notebook server with example notebooks for exploratory analysis.

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The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) are the largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way and close enough to allow for a detailed exploration of their structure and formation history. The Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH ) is a community Dark Energy Camera (DECam) survey of the Magellanic Clouds using $sim$50 nights to sample over $sim$2400 deg$^2$ centered on the Clouds at $sim$20% filling factor (but with contiguous coverage in the central regions) and to depths of $sim$24th mag in $ugriz$. The primary goals of SMASH are to map out the extended stellar peripheries of the Clouds and uncover their complicated interaction and accretion history as well as to derive spatially-resolved star formation histories of the central regions and create a movie of their past star formation. Here we announce the second SMASH public data release (DR2), which contains all 197 fully-calibrated DECam fields including the main body fields in the central regions. The DR2 data are available through the Astro Data Lab hosted by the NSFs National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. We highlight three science cases that make use of the SMASH DR2 data and will be published in the future: (1) preliminary star formation histories of the LMC; (2) the search for Magellanic star clusters using citizen scientists; and, (3) photometric metallicities of Magellanic Cloud stars using the DECam $u$-band.
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the closest and most studied example of an irregular galaxy. Among its principal defining morphological features, its off-centred bar and single spiral arm stand out, defining a whole family of galaxies known as th e Magellanic spirals (Sm). These structures are thought to be triggered by tidal interactions and possibly maintained via gas accretion. However, it is still unknown whether they are long-lived stable structures. In this work, by combining photometry that reaches down to the oldest main sequence turn-off in the colour-magnitude diagrams (CMD, up to a distance of $sim$4.4 kpc from the LMC centre) from the SMASH survey and CMD fitting techniques, we find compelling evidence supporting the long-term stability of the LMC spiral arm, dating the origin of this structure to more than 2~Gyr ago. The evidence suggests that the close encounter between the LMC and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) that produced the gaseous Magellanic Stream and its Leading Arm (LA) also triggered the formation of the LMCs spiral arm. Given the mass difference between the Clouds and the notable consequences of this interaction, we can speculate that this should have been one of their closest encounters. These results set important constraints on the timing of LMC-SMC collisions, as well as on the physics behind star formation induced by tidal encounters.
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