The Magellanic Inter-Cloud Project (MAGIC) II: Slicing up the Bridge
  The origin of the gas in between the Magellanic Clouds (MCs), known as the
Magellanic Bridge (MB), has always been the subject of controversy. To shed
light into this, we present the results from the MAGIC II project aimed at
probing the stellar populations in ten large fields located perpendicular to
the main ridge-line of HI in the Inter-Cloud region. We secured these
observations of the stellar populations in between the MCs using the WFI camera
on the 2.2 m telescope in La Silla. Using colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs), we
trace stellar populations across the Inter-Cloud region. In good agreement with
MAGIC I, we find significant intermediate-age stars in the Inter-Cloud region
as well as young stars of a similar age to the last pericentre passage in
between the MCs (~200 Myr ago). We show here that the young, intermediate-age
and old stars have distinct spatial distributions. The young stars correlate
well with the HI gas suggesting that they were either recently stripped from
the SMC or formed in-situ. The bulk of intermediate-age stars are located
mainly in the bridge region where the HI column density is higher, but they are
more spread out than the young stars. They have very similar properties to
stars located ~2 Kpc from the SMC centre, suggesting that they were tidally
stripped from this region. Finally, the old stars extend to some 8 Kpc from the
SMC supporting the idea that all galaxies have a large extended metal poor
stellar halo.
