Magellanic Bridge photometric catalogue - STEP

The star formation history (SFH), which traces when and how stars formed, provides powerful constraints for the dynamical modelling of the system's past interactions and the processes of stripping and triggered star formation in tidally influenced environments. We aim to reconstruct the SFH of the Magellanic Bridge, the gaseous and stellar stream connecting the Magellanic Clouds.

We used data from the deep optical STEP survey, which covers 54deg^2^ across the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and the Bridge, reaching stars below the oldest main-sequence turnoff at the distance of the MCs. We applied the synthetic colour-magnitude diagram technique to 14deg^2^ of STEP data. We constructed two libraries of synthetic stellar populations based on the PARSEC-COLIBRI and BaSTI stellar evolutionary models, with metallicities in the range -2.0<=[Fe/H]<=0 across the whole Hubble time.