This Ph.D. Thesis has been carried out in the framework of a long-term and large project
devoted to describe the main photometric, chemical, evolutionary and integrated properties of
a representative sample of Large and Small Magellanic Cloud (LMC and SMC respectively)
clusters. The globular clusters system of these two Irregular galaxies provides a rich resource for
investigating stellar and chemical evolution and to obtain a detailed view of the star formation
history and chemical enrichment of the Clouds. The results discussed here are based on the
analysis of high-resolution photometric and spectroscopic datasets obtained by using the last
generation of imagers and spectrographs. The principal aims of this project are summarized as
follows:
• The study of the AGB and RGB sequences in a sample of MC clusters, through the analysis
of a wide near-infrared photometric database, including 33 Magellanic globulars obtained
in three observing runs with the near-infrared camera SOFI@NTT (ESO, La Silla).
• The study of the chemical properties of a sample of MCs clusters, by using optical and
near-infrared high-resolution spectra. 3 observing runs have been secured to our group
to observe 9 LMC clusters (with ages between 100 Myr and 13 Gyr) with the optical
high-resolution spectrograph FLAMES@VLT (ESO, Paranal) and 4 very young (<30
Myr) clusters (3 in the LMC and 1 in the SMC) with the near-infrared high-resolution
spectrograph CRIRES@VLT.
• The study of the photometric properties of the main evolutive sequences in optical Color-
Magnitude Diagrams (CMD) obtained by using HST archive data, with the final aim of
dating several clusters via the comparison between the observed CMDs and theoretical
isochrones. The determination of the age of a stellar population requires an accurate
measure of the Main Sequence (MS) Turn-Off (TO) luminosity and the knowledge of the
distance modulus, reddening and overall metallicity. For this purpose, we limited the study
of the age just to the clusters already observed with high-resolution spectroscopy, in order
to date only clusters with accurate estimates of the overall metallicity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unibo.it/oai:amsdottorato.cib.unibo.it:632 |
| Date | 28 March 2008 |
| Creators | Mucciarelli, Alessio <1980> |
| Contributors | Ferraro, Francesco Rosario, Origlia, Livia, Carretta, Eugenio |
| Publisher | Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna |
| Source Sets | Università di Bologna |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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