Related papers: MIUSCAT: extended MILES spectral coverage. II. Con…
Globular cluster ages are more than just lower limits to the age of the universe; the distribution of ages constraints the timescales for galaxy formation and chemical evolution. Globular cluster populations with different metallicities…
A deep understanding of the Milky Way galaxy, its formation and evolution requires observations of huge numbers of stars. Stellar photometry, therefore, provides an economical method to obtain intrinsic stellar parameters. With the addition…
The Milky Way System and the Andromeda galaxy experienced radically different evolutionary histories. Nevertheless, it is found that these two galaxies ended up with globular cluster systems in which individual clusters have…
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…
The majority of observed mass-to-light ratios of globular clusters are too low to be explained by `canonical' cluster models, in which dynamical effects are not accounted for. Moreover, these models do not reproduce a recently reported…
Large samples of globular clusters (GC) with precise multi-wavelength photometry are becoming increasingly available and can be used to constrain the formation history of galaxies. We present the results of an analysis of Milky Way (MW) and…
In the past decade, the notion that globular clusters (GCs) are composed of coeval stars with homogeneous initial chemical compositions has been challenged by growing evidence that they host an intricate stellar population mix, likely…
We present here a new set of evolutionary population synthesis models for template galaxies along the Hubble morphological sequence. The models, that account for the individual evolution of the bulge, disk, and halo components, provide…
We present spectroscopic ages, metallicities, and [alpha/Fe] ratios for 70 globular clusters in M31 that were derived from Lick line-index measurements. In addition to a population of old (>10 Gyr) globular clusters with a wide range of…
(...) We search for an explanation of the disagreement between the observed integrated colours of 650 local Galactic clusters and the theoretical colours of present-day SSP models. We check the hypothesis that the systematic offsets between…
Uncertainties in stellar population models, both in terms of stellar evolution and stellar spectra, translate into uncertainties in our interpretation of stellar populations in galaxies, since stars are the source of most of the light we…
Globular clusters (GCs) provide statistically significant coeval populations of stars spanning various evolutionary stages, allowing robust constraints on stellar evolution model parameters and ages. We analyze eight old Milky Way GCs with…
We present deep optical and near-infrared imaging of the rich cluster A2218 at z=0.17. Our optical imaging comes from new multicolour Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 observations in the F450W (B), F606W (V) and F814W (I) passbands. These…
We briefly review some constraints (Owing to the limited number of pages of present review, only a sub-sample of the topics discussed during the talk are briefly summarized. For the interested readers we are pleased to send them upon…
This paper is the 4th in a series describing the latest additions to the BaSTI stellar evolution database, which consists of a large set of homogeneous models and tools for population synthesis studies. Here we present a new set of low and…
One of the challenges for stellar astrophysics is to reach the point at which we can undertake reliable spectral synthesis of unresolved populations in young, star-forming galaxies at high redshift. Here I summarise recent studies of…
We compute new population synthesis models of Lick absorption line indices with variable alpha/Fe ratios and use them to derive average ages, metallicities, and alpha/Fe element enhancements for a sample of 126 field and cluster early-type…
M31, our closest neighboring galaxy, is a stepping stone to studies of stellar evolution, star formation, galaxy evolution, and cosmology. However, due to the difficulties of performing photometry in such crowded fields and the lack of wide…
The temperatures and colors of stellar models are much less secure than predicted luminosities; consequently, it is important to ensure that the models which are used to interpret data for stellar populations satisfy existing observational…
The number of methods used to study the properties of galaxies is increased, and testing these methods is very important. Galactic globular clusters (GCs) provide an excellent medium for such test, because they can be considered as simple…