What Triggers Star Formation in the Magellanic Clouds?
The Magellanic Clouds show extensive evidence of mutual interaction. The extreme depth of the SMC (Caldwell & Coulson 1986, Mathewson et al 1986, 1988, Gardiner & Hawkins 1991), the inter-cloud bridge, and the Magellanic Stream all testify that the Clouds have had a tumultuous recent interaction history. Lin & Richer (1992), Muzzio (1988) argue that some MC clusters may have been lost to the Galactic halo on longer time scales. We have noted above (Section 3.4) that the unusual LMC cluster ESO121SC-03 may have formed originally in the SMC. There is growing confidence that many of these global properties can be understood as originating in the tidal interactions of the Clouds with each other and with the Milky Way. Numerous workers (Murai & Fujimoto 1980, Lin & Lynden-Bell 1982, Shuter 1992, Gardiner et al 1994, Moore & Davis 1994, Heller and Rohlfs 1994, Lin et al 1995) have produced increasingly elaborate dynamical models that successfully account for many of the basic properties of t
