Semi-empirical Models of Galaxy Formation and Evolution
Abstract
We provide a review on semi-empirical models of galaxy formation and evolution. We present a brief census of the three main modeling approaches to galaxy evolution, namely hydrodynamical simulations, semi-analytic models, and semi-empirical models (SEMs). We focus on SEMs in their different flavors, i.e. interpretative, descriptive and hybrid, discussing the peculiarities and highlighting virtues and shortcomings for each of these variants. We dissect a simple and recent hybrid SEM from our team to highlight some technical aspects. We offer some outlook on the prospective developments of SEMs. Finally, we provide a short summary of this review.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.12764,
title = {Semi-empirical Models of Galaxy Formation and Evolution},
author = {Andrea Lapi and Lumen Boco and Francesco Shankar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.12764},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
23 pages, 9 figures. This is a pre-print of a chapter for the Encyclopedia of Astrophysics (edited by I. Mandel, section editor S. McGee) to be published by Elsevier as a Reference Module