No abstract

Warps are vertical distortions of stellar and/or gaseous disks of galaxies. One of the proposed scenarios for the formation of warps is the tidal interaction between galaxies. A recent study identified a stellar warp in the outer regions of the South-Western (SW) disk of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and suggested that it might have originated due to the tidal interaction between the LMC and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Due to limited spatial coverage of the data, they could not investigate the counterpart of this warp in the North-Eastern (NE) region, which is essential to understand the global shape, nature and origin of the outer LMC warp. In this work, we study the structure of the LMC disk using the data of red clump stars from the Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3), which cover the entire Magellanic system. We detected a warp in the NE outer LMC disk which is deviated from the disk plane in the same direction as that of the SW outer warp, but with a lower amplitude. This suggests that the outer LMC disk has an asymmetric stellar warp and it is a probable U-shaped warp. Our result provides an observational constraint to the theoretical models of the Magellanic system which tries to understand the LMC-SMC interaction history.