Leveraging HST with MUSE I - NGC 1978

However, MPs are not restricted to ancient clusters, with massive clusters down to ~2Gyr showing signs of chemical variations. This suggests that young and old clusters share the same formation mechanism but most of the work to date on younger clusters has focused on N variations.

Initial studies even suggested that younger clusters may not host spreads in other elements beyond N (e.g. Na), calling into question whether these abundance variations share the same origin as in the older GCs. In this work, we combine Hubble Space Telescope (HST) photometry with Very Large Telescope (VLT)/Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) spectroscopy of a large sample of red giant branch (RGB) stars (338) in the Large Magellanic Cloud cluster NGC 1978, the youngest globular to date with reported MPs in the form of N spreads.