Related papers: Galaxy evolution from "dis"integrated light
Spiral galaxies offer a unique opportunity to study the role of star formation in galaxy evolution and to test various theoretical star formation schemes. I review some recent relevant work on the evolution of spiral galaxies. Detailed…
Open and globular star clusters have served as benchmarks for the study of stellar evolution due to their supposed nature as simple stellar populations of the same age and metallicity. After a brief review of some of the pioneering work…
Galactic bulges are central to understanding galaxy formation and evolution. Here we report on recent studies using micro-lensing events to obtain spectra of high resolution and moderately high signal-to-noise ratios of dwarf stars in the…
The availability of high-quality spectra for a large number of galaxies in the SDSS survey allows for a more sophisticated extraction of information about their stellar populations than, e.g., the luminosity weighted age. Indeed,…
We present a grid of evolutionary calculations for metal-poor low-mass stars for a variety of initial helium and metal abundances. The intention is mainly to provide a database for deriving directly stellar ages of halo and globular cluster…
Each galaxy is observed only once along its life, making galaxy evolution fundamentally an inverse statistical problem: time-dependent physics must be inferred from ensembles of single-epoch snapshots. To move beyond descriptive scaling…
Explaining the formation and evolution of galaxies is one of the most challenging problems in observational cosmology. Many observations suggest that galaxies we see today could have evolved from the merging of smaller subsystems. Evolution…
Today we have numerous evidences that spirals evolve dynamically through various secular or episodic processes, such as bar formation and destruction, bulge growth and mergers, sometimes over much shorter periods than the standard galaxy…
This work investigates the fundamental mechanism(s) that drive galaxy evolution in the Local Universe. By comparing two proxies of star-formation sensitive to different timescales, such as EW(H$\alpha$) and colours like $g-r$, one may…
I briefly review what has been recently learned from determinations of mean stellar ages and abundances from integrated light studies of early-type galaxies, and discuss some new questions posed by recent data. A short discussion of…
Stellar ages are key for determining the formation history of the Milky Way, but are difficult to measure precisely. Furthermore, methods that use chemical abundances to infer ages may entangle the intrinsic evolution of stars with the…
For a sample of bright nearby early-type galaxies we have obtained surface photometry in bands ranging from U to K. Since the galaxies have inclinations larger than 50 deg. it is easy to separate bulges and disks. By measuring the colours…
Constraining the star formation histories (SFHs) of individual galaxies is crucial to understanding the mechanisms that regulate their evolution. Here, we combine multi-wavelength (ultraviolet, optical, and infrared) measurements of a very…
Stars, and collections of stars, encode rich signatures of stellar physics and galaxy evolution. With properties influenced by both their environment and intrinsic nature, stars retain information about astrophysical phenomena that are not…
Massive galaxies, such as nearby ellipticals, have relatively low number densities, yet they host the majority of the stellar mass in the universe. Understanding their origin is a central problem of galaxy formation. Age dating of stellar…
The Spitzer Space Telescope is devoting a significant fraction of the observing time to multi-wavelength cosmological surveys of different depths in various low-background sky regions. Several tens of thousand mid-IR galaxies have been…
We explore the motivation behind large stellar surveys in Galactic astronomy, in particular, surveys that measure the photometric, phase space and abundance properties of thousands or millions of stars. These observations are essential to…
Understanding how galaxies evolved from the early Universe through cosmic time is a fundamental part of modern astrophysics. In order to study this evolution it is important to sample the galaxies at various times in a consistent way…
The study of the ages of early-type galaxies and their dependence on galaxy mass and environment is crucial for understanding the formation and early evolution of galaxies. We review recent works on the M/L ratio evolution, as derived from…
Galaxy haloes contain fundamental clues about the galaxy formation and evolution process: hierarchical cosmological models predict haloes to be ubiquitous, and to be (at least in part) the product of past merger and/or accretion events. The…