"Star formation in the Small Magellanic Cloud: Does the environment matter?"

The question of how local conditions may affect the star and cluster formation processes has implications for our understanding of how stars formed in the early universe. The young star clusters in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are ideal benchmarks for this research, due to their sub-solar metallicity and 1/5 solar dust content. The close proximity of the SMC allows us to perform a detailed and accurate census of its stellar population. Using deep ACS/HST observations, we have fully characterized the stellar content in a number of young star clusters in the SMC, located in different regions of this galaxy such as the "bar" and the Magellanic "bridge", to study the effect of "different" environments on the way stars and clusters form. We find that the youngest clusters host rich populations of low mass pre-Main Sequence stars, indicating that star formation is recent and, possibly, still ongoing. We present our findings on mass function, upper mass cutoff and mass segregation and discuss their implications for our understanding of cluster formation and evolution.