As usual, you are an absolute diamond-mine of information about clusters!
Keep up that research, as you are finding some very interesting things.
As you are finding to be the case , Scratch the surface of any issue relating to nearby southern galaxies, and it is rather common to find a paper by Ken Freeman. His new work, involving Hermes spectrograph on the 4meter AAT is typical of his renewed focus on galaxies close at hand
(the GALAH survey aims to reconstruct the history of the MW, using metallicity and age and kinematic data on its stars)
Here is a grab bag full of possibly relevant info about the LMC:
(1)
In google books, I found an intriguing 1997 reference book about the clouds of Magellan, called "The Magellanic Clouds" by Bengt E. Westerlund. (it is in the "Cambridge Astrophysics Series"
Westerlund includes an entire chapter of information about the clusters of the LMC and SMC, though the information is now old.
(Google books at least enabled me to view
some of the information about the clusters.)
(2)
The
old stellar halo of our own spiral galaxy, is not necessarily typical. Some galaxies, even M31, have been found to have a halo which includes a significant population of intermediate-aged stars.
What is "normal" or "typical" for the halo of a
low luminosity spiral galaxy like the LMC? (if there is such a thing as a "normal" halo for Magellanic Spiral)
(LMC is
not a dwarf galaxy; it is what Gerard de Vaucouleurs called a "subdwarf" galaxy, a couple of magnitudes down in luminosity from a big spiral like the MW. Indeed the luminosity of LMC is comparable to that of M33. Perhaps, before its current interactions and "troubles", it is very conceivable that it may have had regular spiral structure like M33)
(3)
In relation to the possibility that stars and clusters associated with LMC have been ejected a long way from it, Jun-Hwan Choi, in his UMASS thesis "Dynamics of Satellite and Dark Matter Halo Interactions on Galaxy Formation and Evolution", suggests that if there was an interaction of the LMC with the Milky Way, there should be tidally stripped stars found a long way away from the LMC.
(4)
Here is a display of the true shape of the LMC; this is a map which plots the number density of RGB and AGB stars.
North is to the top and east is to the left.
[[ This map is from van der Marel's review paper on the structure and kinematics of the LMC;
http://www.stsci.edu/~marel/pdfdir/L...ymp03_vdm3.pdf
(this is an excellent overview of the structure of the LMC....) ]]
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Dana, it is going to be tough to explain what is going on with the objects you have observed; the gaseous distribution of the LMC is disturbed and extends to
several times the radius of the distribution of old stars seen in the above image!
Here is an interesting quotation:
The Magellanic Clouds have been studied in great detail covering the entire spectral range. The interaction becomes most evident in neutral, atomic hydrogen (HI). Huge gaseous arms have been detected covering a large fraction of the southern sky. Figure 2 shows the HI column density distribution of the Magellanic Clouds and their environment and a mean velocity map obtained from Brüns et al. (2004). The LMC and the SMC are not isolated galaxies but embedded in a common HI envelope called the Magellanic Bridge (Hindman 1961). Moreover, the two galaxies possess prominent gaseous arms, the Magellanic Stream (Mathewson et al. 1974) and the Leading Arm (Putman et al. 1998), with an extension of about 180° on the sky. The Magellanic Stream shows a huge velocity gradient of ΔvLSR = 650 km/s over its extent of about 100° that is still considerable in the Galactic-standard-of-rest frame, ΔvGSR = 390 km/s, while the Leading Arm shows no clear velocity gradient.
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And now a word from Dana's dream girlfriend:
"Darling, I just love that way you talk about elemental abundances in stars..."
(win her heart with a heated discussion of the Sodium-Oxygen anticorrelation!)
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