The Magellanic Clouds’ extended stellar periphery and Rubin’s future

Abstract: The stellar outskirts of galaxies hold the fossil records of their host’s hierarchical merger history. In this sense, the Magellanic Clouds offer a unique opportunity to watch how these stellar outskirts react to a merger event. This applies both to their merging with each other and their interaction with the Milky Way. To this end, the last decade has revolutionized our view of these galaxies’ outskirts. Large-scale surveys, along with Gaia data, have given us a very detailed view of the outskirts, revealing many substructures that seem to have arisen from tidal interactions. We will review what we know about these substructures and the current hypotheses for their formation, which stem from a variety of kinematic and abundance studies. Then, we will present our latest study using the latest data from the DELVE survey, which is currently the deepest and most extensive photometric survey of the Magellanic periphery. This includes a detailed analysis of the density profile and a potential discovery of the Magellanic Stream’s stellar counterpart. Finally, with the advent of Rubin and the LSST dataset, we will explain what we can expect from it and the timelines for future data releases.