Revisiting a detached stellar structure in the outer northeastern region of the Small Magellanic Cloud

TL;DR

This study investigates the nature and structure of a shell-like overdensity in the outer northeastern region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, revealing its extended line-of-sight depth and possible tidal origin.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of star clusters in the overdensity, clarifies their ages and distances, and suggests a tidal formation scenario for the structure.

Findings

Some star clusters are not genuine, others are young or intermediate-age.

The overdensity is more extended along the line-of-sight than previously thought.

Younger clusters tend to be more metal-rich and less massive, with a slight reddening trend.

Abstract

The outer northeastern region of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is populated by a shell-like overdensity whose nature was recently investigated. We analyzed twenty catalogued star clusters projected onto it from Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History data sets. After carrying out a cleaning of field stars in the star cluster colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs), and deriving their astrophysical properties from the comparison between the observed and synthetic CMDs, we found that four objects are not genuine star clusters, while the remaining ones are young star clusters (11, age $\sim$ 30-200 Myr) and intermediate-age (5, age $\sim$ 1.7-2.8 Gyr) star clusters, respectively. The resulting distances show that intermediate-age and some young star clusters belong to the SMC main body, while the remaining young star clusters are nearly 13.0 kpc far away from those in the SMC, revealing that the shell-like overdensity is more extended along the line-of-sight than previously thought. We also found a clear age trend and a blurred metallicity correlation along the line-of-sight of young clusters, in the sense that the farther a star cluster from the SMC, the younger, the more metal rich, and the less massive it is. These young clusters are also affected by a slightly larger interstellar reddening than the older ones in the shell-like overdensity. These outcomes suggest that the shell-like overdensity can possibly be another tidally perturbed/formed SMC stellar structure from gas striped off its body, caused by the interaction with the Large Magellanic Cloud or the Milky Way.