The Stellar Populations of the Magellanic Clouds

Abstract

In many ways, studies of the stellar populations in the Magellanic Clouds are more straightforward than in our own Galaxy because of our external vantage point of the Clouds. This allows us to study the global properties of their stellar populations, as well as the individual stars that comprise them. The resulting picture describing the stellar content of the Clouds is obviously complex, defying any attempt to present a complete description in a short review such as this. Thus, my goal is to provide a very broad overview of the global properties of the Magellanic Clouds, along with some slightly more detailed discussions on a few selected topics addressed by recent studies. Recent reviews of the global properties and stellar content of the Magellanic Clouds based on observations ranging from radio to x-ray wavelengths can be found in the Proceedings of IAU Symposium 148 (Haynes and Milne 1991) and in Westerlund (1990). More specialized reviews have been written recently by van den Bergh (1991), Freeman (1989), and Feast (1989), and by numerous authors in the proceedings of a recent European Colloquium on the Magellanic Clouds (de Boer, et al. 1989).