On the Spatial Distribution of Stellar Populations in the Large Magellanic Cloud

We measure the angular correlation function of stars in a region of the LargeMagellanic Cloud (LMC) that spans 2 degrees by 1.5 degrees. We find that thecorrelation functions of stellar populations are represented well byexponential functions of the angular separation for separations between 2 and40 arcmin (corresponding to ~ 30 pc and 550 pc for an LMC distance of 50 kpc).The inner boundary is set by the presence of distinct, highly correlatedstructures, which are the more familiar stellar clusters, and the outerboundary is set by the observed region's size and the presence of two principalcenters of star formation within the region. We also find that thenormalization and scale length of the correlation function changessystematically with the mean age of the stellar population. The existence ofpositive correlation at large separations (~300 pc), even in the youngestpopulation, argues for large-scale hierarchical structure in current starformation. The evolution of the angular correlation toward lower normalizationsand longer scale lengths with stellar age argues for the dispersion of starswith time. We show that a simple, stochastic, self-propagating star formationmodel is qualitatively consistent with this behavior of the correlationfunction.Comment: 30 pages, 13 Figures. Scheduled for publication in AJ in June 199