Determination of age/star formation history using Population Synthesis models

Part of the Advanced cource on "Galaxies" (Sep 2013 - 9 hours)

Divakara Mayya
ydm@inaoep.mx

Objectives of the course: to be able to answer the following questions yourself!

1. When and when not to use a Population Synthesis model?
2. Which of the existing Population Synthesis codes is the best?
3. Can I construct a Population Synthesis code? How long it would take me?

 Whoever wants to attend the course 
should read at least one of the 10 papers listed in Sec. 5, and
explain in the class the historical significance of that paper.

 TOPICS  

 1. Introductory material 

   - Definition of age and star formation history (SFH)
   - Star clusters, starbursts and resolved stellar populations
   - Initial Mass Function
   - Interstellar extinction laws
   - Nebular emission
   - Stellar evolution
   - Stellar atmosphere

 2. Population Synthesis - Theoretical framework 

   - Simple Stellar Populations (SSP)
   - Continuous star formation 

 3. Age-sensitive observational quantities 

   Understanding the evolutionary behavior of:

   - Nebular emission line equivalent widths
   - Optical and NIR Colors
   - Optical spectra
   - Spectral energy distribution (SED)
   - Secondary tracers

 4. Practical work 

   - Construction of a very simple population code
   - Analysis of observed spectra
   - Analysis of color-color diagrams
   - Analysis of SEDs

 5. Benchmark papers on Population synthesis modeling 

   1  Huchra (1977)   Star formation in blue galaxies 
   2  Larsen & Tinsley (1977)   Star formation rates in normal and peculiar galaxies 
   3  Weedman et al. (1981)  NGC 7714 - The prototype star-burst galactic nucleus
   4  Rieke et al. (1980)  The nature of the nuclear sources in M82 and NGC 253
   5  Kennicutt (1983)  The rate of star formation in normal disk galaxies
   6  Buzzoni (1989)  Evolutionary population synthesis in stellar systems. I 
   7  Olofsson (1989)  Spectral evolutionary synthesis models of metal-poor star forming regions   
   8  Bruzual & Charlot (1993)  Spectral evolution of stellar populations using isochrone synthesis
   9  Bressan et al. (1994)  Spectrophotometric evolution of elliptical galaxies. I
  10  Leitherer & Heckman (1995)   Synthetic properties of starburst galaxies (precursor to STARBURST99) 

Table relating Mass to Luminosity of MS stars

Nebular continuum values (Brown and Mathews 1970; Ferland 1980). The equation to use these tables can be found in Mayya (1995) (eqn 7 and 8)
Gamma(HI) | Gamma(He II) | Gam0(2q) | Gamma(He I)

Data tables for IB from Mayya (1997)
Luminosities | colours
or you can download IB models from STARBURST99 or from Marigo et al. (2008) (recommended)