MW-MC Bridge young stellar members

This Bridge has likely formed during the most recent interaction between the Clouds, about 150-250Myr ago. While some young stars observed in the Bridge have formed in-situ from the tidally stripped gas, stellar populations may also have been drawn out of the SMC during the tidal interaction.

We aim to identify a clean sample of likely Bridge stars in the region between the LMC and SMC using Gaia DR3 astrometric and photometric data combined with machine-learning techniques. We use the dimensionality-reduction algorithm UMAP to construct a training sample of young stars in the outskirts of the SMC and LMC. A neural network trained on this sample is then applied to Gaia sources in the inter-Cloud region to classify the stars and identify candidate Bridge members.