The Large Magellanic Cloud hosts a rich variety of binary clusters

Binary clusters are rare in our own galaxy; the only one we can observe is the famous Double Cluster, NGC 869 and NGC 884, in Perseus. But lying close to Perseus’ northern boundary with Cassiopeia at Dec 57° 08′, it’s not exactly optimally located for us in the Southern Hemisphere! On the other hand, binary clusters appear to be common in the Large Magellanic Cloud and the galaxy generously offers us a wonderful collection of them to observe! Even more fascinating, we can also observe the only known binary globular cluster system!

The first catalogue of binary star clusters in the LMC was presented by Bhatia & Hatzidimitriou (1988) and contained 69 pairs. Bhatia et al. (1991) surveyed the LMC’s cluster system (which consisted of 1200 objects known at that time), and their final list of binary clusters contains 64 pairs (most of which we can observe, and which are presented below), and all of which, bar two, were confirmed by Dieball et al. (2002, who provided a new catalogue of all binary and multiple cluster candidates. More studies on binary cluster candidates have been performed but concentrate mainly on one or a few individual objects in order to establish their binarity.