Stripped Stars in the Magellanic Clouds: Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg

Recent work has discovered a population of intermediate-mass stripped helium stars in the Magellanic clouds, which are higher-mass (1-5 M⊙) analogs of canonical hot subdwarfs (sdBs). The objects discovered so far are likely to only represent a small and biased fraction of the total population. To characterize the completeness of the known stripped star sample, we forward-model a simulated stripped star population, inject the simulated sources into Swift UV images, and reproduce the cascade of quality cuts used to select the observed stripped star candidates in the Clouds via UV excess. Our analysis reveals that a large majority of stripped stars will not be selected by searches based on UV excess, because of crowding, dust extinction, and flux dilution from binary companions which bury them in the main sequence. I will discuss the inferred total stripped star population of the Clouds, their connections to Galactic sdBs, and the predicted properties of the stripped stars that have thus far evaded detection.