Photometry of the Oldest Field Populations in the Magellanic Clouds

Details Photometry of the Oldest Field Populations in the Magellanic Clouds Photometry of the Oldest Field Populations in the Magellanic Clouds

Jul 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996hst..prop.6604w&link_type=abstract

HST Proposal ID #6604

Computer Science

Hst Proposal Id #6604 Stellar Populations

Scientific paper

We propose to obtain deep V {F555W} and I {F814W} images for one field in the Large Magellanic Cloud {LMC}, one field in the Small Magellanic Cloud {SMC}, and for the old SMC cluster NGC 121. These observations will allow us to measure ages and population densities of the oldest field stars {t > 5Gyr} in the Magellanic Clouds {MC}, and place into context the ages of formation of the Galaxy and the two MC's. In our own Galaxy, the oldest nearby stars appear to belong to two subsystems: an initial population represented by a flattened spheroid with a small amount of rotation, and a non-rotating spherical population which may be a few Gyr younger than the first population. A third old population, the ``metal-weak old disk'', also may exist. In the outer regions of the MC's where we would expect to find populations analogous to the Galactic Population II, we see something much different: a field population that is dominated by stars with Fe/H -0.6 and t 8Gyr, with small admixtures of a very old metal-poor population analogous to the Galactic halo and a younger {t 5Gyr} system {in the LMC}. We propose to measure the ages of the oldest MC field populations and the oldest SMC cluster to compare with the ages of the oldest components of our Galactic halo and disk. The observations will be interpreted using synthetic color-magnitude diagrams and luminosity functions to develop a model for the star formation history in both the MC's over the first 10 Gyr.

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