The Magellanic Clouds, Past, Present and Future - A Summary of IAU Symposium No. 190

Abstract

Important problems to which we would like to find answers are: •What are the distances to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC)?•What is the present distribution of stars, gas and dark matter in the Clouds, and how did it evolve?•How, and where, did the Magellanic Clouds form, and how have their orbits evolved?•Finally the recent discovery of numerous microlensing events in the Clouds provides answers to questions that we have only recently started to ask.