Related papers: Spectral libraries and their uncertainties
The near-infrared (NIR) wavelength range offers some unique spectral features, and it is less prone to the extinction than the optical one. Recently, the first flux calibrated NIR library of cool stars from the NASA Infrared Telescope…
Binaries are excellent astrophysical laboratories that provide us with direct measurements of fundamental stellar parameters. Compared to single isolated star, multiplicity induces new processes, offering the opportunity to confront our…
Stellar population synthesis can be approached as an inverse problem. The physical information is extracted from the observations through an inverse model. The process requires the transformation of the observational errors into model…
Planetary nebulae have been used as tracers of light and kinematics for the stellar populations in early-type galaxies since more than twenty years. Several empirical properties have surfaced: for example the invariant bright cut-off of the…
Stellar populations, building blocks of galaxies, are direct tracers of the star formation history, the chemical enrichment and the assembly of galaxies in the Universe. They therfore allow us to understand how galaxies formed and evolved.…
Our ability to extract information from the spectra of stars depends on reliable models of stellar atmospheres and appropriate techniques for spectral synthesis. Various model codes and strategies for the analysis of stellar spectra are…
To date, Galactic Astronomy has largely concerned itself with astrophysical processes, and with the locations, space motions and compositions of objects. Consider, for example, the elucidation of the components of the Galaxy over the past…
Over the past decades, libraries of stellar spectra have been used in a large variety of science cases, including as sources of reference spectra for a given object or a given spectral type. Despite the existence of large libraries and the…
We built modelled spectra of stellar population at high resolution and with variable alpha-elements enhancements. Analysing spectra of Galactic globular clusters we show that it is possible to derive reliably and efficiently [Mg/Fe] using…
Rapid progress is now being made in the study of stellar populations of galaxies at large lookback times, both in dense clusters and the field. Dramatic transformations in star formation histories (even morphologies) appear to prevail among…
The study of binary stars is worth to undertake not only to learn more about the properties of binaries as such, but also because binaries are multi-purpose astrophysical tools. This paper reviews some of the ways this effective "tool" can…
This is a summary of my lectures during the 2011 IAC Winter School in Puerto de la Cruz. I give an introduction to the field of stellar populations in galaxies, and highlight some new results. Since the title of the Winter School was {\it…
Over the last decades, evolutionary population synthesis models have powered an unmatched leap forward in our understanding of galaxies. From dating the age of the first galaxies in the Universe to detailed measurements of the chemical…
In this article we summarise on-going work on the so-called Gaia FGK Benchmark Stars. This work consists of the determination of their atmospheric parameters and of the construction of a high-resolution spectral library. The definition of…
The last decade has seen enormous progress in understanding the structure of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies via the production of large-scale digital surveys of the sky like 2MASS and SDSS, as well as specialized, counterpart…
Determining the properties of old stellar systems using evolutionary population synthesis requires a library of reliable model stellar fluxes. Empirical libraries are limited to spectra of stars in the solar neighborhood, with nearly solar…
We review the main stellar features observed in starburst spectra from the UV to the near-IR and their use as fundamental tools to determine the properties of stellar populations from integrated spectra. The origin and dependence of the…
Scientific digital libraries provide users access to large amounts of data to satisfy their diverse information needs. Factors influencing users' decisions on the relevancy of a publication or a person are individual and usually only…
The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies are shaped by nearly every physical property of the system, including the star formation history, metal content, abundance pattern, dust mass, grain size distribution, star-dust geometry,…
We briefly present the history of technical solutions aimed at improving the efficiency of spectroscopy on small- and moderate-diameter telescopes. We assess the current state of spectroscopy techniques and some of the perspectives.