• DOI:10.1093/mnras/stx205
• Corpus ID: 119226007

The VMC Survey - XXIV. Signatures of tidally stripped stellar populations from the inner Small Magellanic Cloud

@article{Subramanian2017TheVS,
  title={The VMC Survey - XXIV. Signatures of tidally stripped stellar populations from the inner Small Magellanic Cloud},
  author={Smitha Subramanian and Stefano Rubele and Ning-Chen Sun and L{\'e}o Girardi and Richard de Grijs and Jacco Th. van Loon and Maria-Rosa L. Cioni and Andr{\'e}s E. Piatti and Kenji Bekki and James P. Emerson and Valentin D. Ivanov and Leandro de O Kerber and Marcella Marconi and Vincenzo Ripepi and Benjamin L. Tatton},
  journal={Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society},
  year={2017},
  volume={467},
  pages={2980-2995}
}

• S. Subramanian, S. Rubele, +12 authors B. Tatton
• Published 20 January 2017
• Physics
• Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

We study the luminosity function of intermediate-age red-clump stars using deep, near-infrared photometric data covering $\sim$ 20 deg$^2$ located throughout the central part of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), comprising the main body and the galaxy's eastern wing, based on observations obtained with the VISTA Survey of the Magellanic Clouds (VMC). We identified regions which show a foreground population ($\sim$11.8 $\pm$ 2.0 kpc in front of the main body) in the form of a distance bimodality in the red-clump distribution. The most likely explanation for the origin of this feature is tidal stripping from the SMC rather than the extended stellar haloes of the Magellanic Clouds and/or tidally stripped stars from the Large Magellanic Cloud. The homogeneous and continuous VMC data trace this feature in the direction of the Magellanic Bridge and, particularly, identify (for the first time) the inner region ($\sim$ 2 -- 2.5 kpc from the centre) from where the signatures of interactions start becoming evident. This result provides observational evidence of the formation of the Magellanic Bridge from tidally stripped material from the SMC.