Blue-violet spectral evolution of young magellanic cloud clusters

Abstract

We study the integrated spectral evolution in the blue-violet range of 97 blue star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds, from those associated with gas emission to those as old as a few hundred Myr. Some clusters are dominated by the flux of those massive stars that pass through evolutionary stages such as Wolf-Rayet, Luminous Blue Variable, Be, and supergiant stars of different temperatures. The relationships among spectral features such as absorption and emission lines, Balmer discontinuity and Balmer continuum are used to study the spectral evolution of the clusters. Finally, we sort into groups spectra of similar evolutionary stages, creating a template spectral library with possible applications in stellar population syntheses of star-forming galaxies and in the spectral simulation of bursts of star formation with different mean ages and durations.