Speaker
Description
In the last decades, our understanding of dwarf galaxies has significantly advanced, driven by efforts to characterize their evolution and interactions with their surrounding environments. Ground-based observations, particularly those utilizing wide field-of-view telescopes like VST, have enabled detailed studies of both the central regions and the outer edges of the closer dwarfs, such as the Magellanic Clouds. In this context, we focus on the stellar populations of the Magellanic Bridge, likely formed during the last close encounter between the Magellanic Clouds approximately 150 Myr ago. Metallicity measurements from gas absorption lines indicate that the Bridge is predominantly composed of SMC material, with the interaction leaving imprints in its chemical enrichment and ongoing star formation. To investigate this encounter, we applied a color–magnitude diagram reconstruction technique to data from the STEP survey (The SMC in Time: Evolution of a Prototype interacting late-type dwarf galaxy), deriving the global Star Formation History (SFH) of the whole Magellanic Bridge. Thanks to VST's high photometric accuracy and deep magnitude limit, we reached the ancient main-sequence turn-off in the Bridge, reconstructing the SFH of this region with high age resolution. This allowed us to constrain the timing of the last close encounter between the Magellanic Clouds. When combined with the dynamical modeling of the system, our results may offer new insights into how tidal interactions have shaped the evolution of the Magellanic Clouds. These findings underscore the importance of understanding the complex interplay between star formation, chemical enrichment, and galaxy interactions in the low-mass regime.