Understand
The Magellanic Clouds offer unique opportunities to study star formation both on the global scales of an interacting system of gas-rich galaxies, as well as on the scales of individual star-forming clouds.
- The interstellar media of the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds and their connecting bridge, span a range in (low) metallicities and gas density.
- This allows us to study star formation near the critical density and gain an understanding of how tidal dwarfs might form; the low metallicity of the SMC in particular is typical of galaxies during the early phases of their assembly, and studies of star formation in the SMC provide a stepping stone to understand star formation at high redshift where these processes can not be directly observed.
- In this review, I introduce the different environments encountered in the Magellanic System and compare these with the Schmidt-Kennicutt law and the predicted efficiencies of various chemo-physical processes.