Star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds

Abstract

Study of the Magellanic Clouds star clusters is of extreme importance for understanding the processes of star formation and evolution in a galaxy as well as for the study of structure and evolution of galaxies. They extend the range of comparison between stellar evolutionary theory and observational data. A comparison of the observed colour-magnitude diagrams and the main sequence luminosity functions of four Large Magellanic Cloud star clusters namely, NGC 1711, NGC 2004, NGC 2164 and NGC 2214 with the synthetic ones derived from the stellar evolutionary models favours the convective core overshoot models. As the evolutionary history of the Magellanic Clouds has been very different from that of our Galaxy, study of the mass function of these young star clusters which are rich in stars, and span a wide mass range, can provide the answer to the astrophysically important question of the universality of the shape of the initial mass function in time and space.