Metallicity maps of the Magellanic Clouds

Results. We present photometric metallicity maps for ~90000 young stars and ~270000 old stars within ~11{deg} of the Small Magellanic Cloud and ~20{deg} of the Large Magellanic Cloud from a homogeneous dataset. We find that the overall radial metallicity gradients decrease linearly, in agreement with previous studies.

Thanks to the large stellar samples, we could apply piecewise-regression fitting to derive the gradients within different radial regions. The catalogues containing the estimated photometric metallicities from this work are made available at the CDS. The overall metallicity gradients, traced by young and old stars, decrease from the centre to the outskirts of both galaxies.

However, they show multiple breakpoints, depicting regions following different and sometimes opposite trends. These are associated with the structure of the galaxies and their history of star formation and chemical evolution but may be influenced by a low number of sources, especially at the centre (due to crowding) and in the outermost regions.