Lessons from the Magellanic System and its modeling

Abstract

The prominent Magellanic Stream that dominates the H i sky provides a tantalizing number of observations that potentially constrains the Magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way (MW) outskirts. Here we show that the 'ram-pressure plus collision' model naturally explain these properties, and is able to predict some of the most recent observations made after the model was made. These include the complexity of the stellar populations in the Magellanic Bridge, for which kinematics, ages, and distances are well measured, and the Northern Tidal Arm, for which the model predicts its formation from the MW tidal forces. It appears that this over-constrained model provides a good path to investigate the Stream properties. This contrasts with tidal models that reproduce only half of the Stream's main properties, in particular a tidal tail cannot reproduce the observed inter-twisted filaments, and its gas content is not sufficiently massive to provide the large amount of H i and H ii gas associated to the Stream. Despite the efforts made to reproduce the large amounts of gas brought by the Clouds, it seems that no viable solution for the tidal model could be foreseen. Since the 'ram-pressure plus collision' model has not succeeded for a Large Magellanic Cloud mass above 2 × 1010 M⊙, we conjecture that a low mass is required to form the Stream.