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We study the stellar content in the tidal tails of three nearby merginggalaxies, NGC 520, NGC 2623, and NGC 3256, using BVI imaging taken with theAdvanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope. The tidaltails in all three systems contain compact and fairly massive young starclusters, embedded in a sea of diffuse, unresolved stellar light. We comparethe measured colors and luminosities with predictions from population synthesismodels to estimate cluster ages and find that clusters began forming in tidaltails during or shortly after the formation of the tails themselves. We find alack of very young clusters ($\le 10$ Myr old), implying that eventually starformation shuts off in the tails as the gas is used up or dispersed. There area few clusters in each tail with estimated ages that are older than the modeledtails themselves, suggesting that these may have been stripped out from theoriginal galaxy disks. The luminosity function of the tail clusters can bedescribed by a single power-law, $dN/dL \propto L^\alpha$, with $-2.6 < \alpha< -2.0$. We find a stellar age gradient across some of the tidal tails, whichwe interpret as a superposition of 1) newly formed stars and clusters along thedense center of the tail and 2) a sea of broadly distributed, older stellarmaterial ejected from the progenitor galaxies.

Ages of Star Clusters in the Tidal Tails of Merging Galaxies