The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. Multiple Cluster Candidates in the Large Magellanic Cloud

TL;DR

This paper identifies and analyzes 100 multiple cluster candidates in the Large Magellanic Cloud, revealing their potential physical association, common origins, and similarities with clusters in the Small Magellanic Cloud, based on statistical and age distribution analyses.

Contribution

It presents a new catalog of multiple cluster candidates in the LMC and provides insights into their physical properties and origins, comparing them with SMC clusters.

Findings

A significant fraction of candidates may be physical systems.

Many components share coeval ages, indicating common origins.

Size and age distributions are similar between multiple and single clusters.

Abstract

We present 100 multiple cluster candidates selected from the OGLE catalog of star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Statistical analysis shows that the significant fraction of these objects may constitute physical systems. Coeval ages of 102 components of multiple objects suggest their common origin. 53 components have very different ages. The comparison of the population of multiple clusters candidates from the SMC and the LMC shows that: a) distributions of sizes and ages of multiple and single clusters from the Magellanic Clouds are very similar, b) the difference of sizes of components of a given system is small, c) in both distributions of separation of multiple clusters from the LMC and SMC two peaks are seen at about 9 pc and 15 pc, d) both age distributions reveal peaks around 100 Myr, which may be connected with the last encounter of the LMC and the SMC.