2010AJ....139..878S

In this paper, we discuss the properties of color-magnitude diagrams, age, metallicity, and radial velocities of eight massive Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) clusters using data taken from the FORS2 multiobject spectrograph at the 8.2 m Very Large Telescope/Unit Telescope 1. The strong near-infrared Ca II triplet lines of red giant branch stars obtained from the high signal-to-noise ratio spectra are used to determine the metallicity and radial velocity of cluster members. We report for the first time spectroscopically determined metallicity values for four clusters based on the mean [Fe/H] value of ∼10 cluster members each. We found two concentrations in the distribution of ages of the target clusters. Six have ages between 0.8 Gyr and 2.2 Gyr and the other two, NGC 1754 and NGC 1786, are very old. The metallicity of the six intermediate-age clusters, with a mean age of 1.5 Gyr, is -0.49 with a scatter of only 0.04. This tight distribution suggests that a close encounter between the LMC and Small Magellanic Cloud may have caused not only the restart of cluster formation in the LMC but also the generation of the central bar. The metallicity for the two old clusters is similar to that of the other old, metal-poor LMC clusters. We find that the LMC cluster system exhibits disk-like rotation with no clusters appearing to have halo kinematics and there is no evidence of a metallicity gradient in the LMC, in contrast with the stellar population of the Milky Way and M33, where the metallicity decreases as galactocentric distance increases. The LMC's stellar bar may be the factor responsible for the dilution of any kind of gradient in the LMC.