Recovering the ages and metallicities of stars of a complex stellar population system

Hidalgo, Sebastian L.; Aparicio, Antonio; Gallart, Carme
Bibliographical reference

The Ages of Stars, Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, IAU Symposium, Volume 258, p. 245-252

Advertised on:
6
2009
Number of authors
3
IAC number of authors
3
Citations
4
Refereed citations
3
Description
We present a new method to solve for the star-formation history (SFH) of a complex stellar population system from the analysis of the color-magnitude diagram (CMD). The SFH is obtained in four steps: i) computing a synthetic CMD, ii) simulating observational effects, iii) parameterization and sampling of the synthetic and observed CMDs, and iv) solving and averaging the solutions. The consistency and stability of the method have been tested using a mock stellar population. The method has been used to solve the SFH of a set of six isolated Local Group dwarf galaxies observed with HST. The main goal is to probe the effects of cosmological processes, such as reionization in the early star formation, or the ability of SNe feedback to remove gas in small halos, in dwarf galaxies free from environmental effects due to the strong interaction with the host galaxy.