A Stellar Heist in the Magellanic Clouds

We present an analysis of the stellar kinematics of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), based on several thousand spectra obtained with Hydra-CTIO of massive red supergiants, oxygen-rich and carbon-rich AGB stars, and other giants. We have used the stellar velocities to measure the rotation curve of the LMC, which we find to have an amplitude of 87 +/- 5 km s(-1), a value that is in agreement with all of the available kinematic tracers. Our data also reveal a population of outliers, comprising similar to 5% of the sample, that have line-of-sight velocities that apparently oppose the sense of rotation of the LMC disk. We show that these outliers likely represent stars that were captured by the LMC from the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The capture of these SMC stars and gas by the LMC may have been the trigger for the intense star formation that we now see in 30 Doradus, the most active star formation complex in the nearby universe, and may explain the detection of LMC microlensing events found by the MACHO and OGLE projects.