The VISCACHA survey: deep and spatially resolved photometry of Magellanic Cloud star clusters with SAM

Submitted by jelias on Mon, 2019-02-18 16:49

The VISCACHA survey is an ambitious project that aims to observe deep and spatially resolved photometry of all star clusters in the periphery of the Magellanic Clouds. The need for a few hundred hours of 4-m telescope time, coupled with an adaptive optics module, makes SAM-I at SOAR the perfect setup.

Among the topics where the VISCACHA survey will play an important role are:

• 3D map of the Magellanic Clouds with accurate physical (age, metallicity, reddening, luminosity function,  total mass) and structural (core radius, tidal radius, ellipticity) parameters for all star clusters;
• Age-metallicity relation and radial gradients
• Star cluster formation and dissolution history
• Initial mass function of high- and low-mass clusters
• Extended main-sequence turnoff

... and more. The first paper, accepted by MNRAS, (Maia et al., 2019) describes the survey and the full analysis of nine selected clusters. The figure below is taken from this paper.

Central panel: VISCACHA sample, including ∼130 clusters observed through 2015-2017 (red circles). Small black dots correspond to the catalogued objects in the Magellanic System by Bica et al.(2008: MNRAS 389,678). Surrounding panels:V images of selected targets, representing the variety of cluster types in the survey.
 

More information can be found on the VISCACHA website: http://www.astro.iag.usp.br/~viscacha/

(Thanks to Bruno Dias and collaborators for the text and figure)