The star formation history of the Large Magellanic Cloud as seen by star clusters and stars

TL;DR

This study assesses how star cluster populations can be used to reconstruct the star formation history of the Large Magellanic Cloud, comparing methods based on cluster mass and full populations with CMD-derived histories.

Contribution

It introduces and compares two methods for deriving star formation history from star clusters, highlighting their effectiveness and limitations in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Findings

Good agreement with CMD-based history for the last 1 Gyr.

Significant cluster deficiency during the 'cluster age gap'.

Only about 10% of stars form in long-lived clusters.

Abstract

The aim of this work is to test to what extent the star cluster population of a galaxy can be utilised to constrain or estimate the star formation history, with the Large Magellanic Cloud as our testbed. We follow two methods to extract information about the star formation rate from star clusters, either using only the most massive clusters (Maschberger & Kroupa 2007) or using the whole cluster population, albeit this is only possible for a shorter age span. We compare these results with the star formation history derived from colour-magnitude diagrams and find good overall agreement for the most recent approximately 1 Gyr. For later ages, and especially during the "cluster age gap", there is a deficiency of star clusters in relation to the star formation rate derived from the colour-magnitude diagram. The star formation rates following from the whole cluster population lie a factor of approximately 10 lower than the star formation rates deduced from the most massive clusters or from the colour-magnitude diagram, suggesting that only approximately 10 per cent of all stars form in long-lived bound star clusters.