Image Details
Caption: Figure 12.
Left panel: giants within 12° of the LMC are shown in Magellanic Stream coordinates (relative to the LMC center) with pixels colored by mean metallicity. The metal-rich central region traces the bar and the dominant spiral arm of the Cloud. The northern portions of the disk trace arc-like features and the southern region shows a spiral-like feature with moderately enhanced metallicity. Middle panel: mean metallicity map of and inclined disk with viewing angles of Choi et al. (2018b) and radial metallicity function defined by the parameters found by out fitting method. Right panel: we subtract the metallicity of the model pixels from that of our data to highlight regions that are enhanced/depleted with respect to a disk whose radial metallicity distribution follows the form of Equation (2). Red pixels correspond to metal-richer regions and blue pixels to metal-poorer ones with respect to the model. The most striking revelation in doing this is that of the LMC’s metal-rich bar and inner northern spiral arm emanating from the northwest end of the bar. Giants used to make this figure were subject to our nearest neighbor selection in feature space. Prominent regions, other than the bar, of enhanced metallicity are annotated and labeled.
© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.