Related papers: A new inverse method for stellar population synthe…
Spectra of late-type stars are usually analyzed with static model atmospheres in local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) and a homogeneous plane-parallel or spherically symmetric geometry. The energy balance requires particular attention, as…
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…
We investigate the hypothesis that stars form in aggregates of binary systems and that the dynamical evolution of these aggregates leads to the observed properties of binary stars in the Galactic field. We assume that the initial…
In stellar astrophysics, the technique of population synthesis has been successfully used for several decades. For planets, it is in contrast still a young method which only became important in recent years because of the rapid increase of…
We present a new set of stellar interior and synthesis models for predicting the integrated emission from stellar populations in star clusters and galaxies of arbitrary age and metallicity. This work differs from existing spectral synthesis…
Elliptical galaxies are believed to consist of a single population of old stars formed together at an early epoch in the Universe, yet recent analyses of galaxy spectra seem to indicate the presence of significant younger populations of…
The determination of chemical composition is crucial for investigating the formation and evolution of star forming galaxies and provides a powerful tool to constrain the effects of galactic winds and accretion from the cosmic web. In this…
We present a new approach to constrain galaxy physical parameters from the combined interpretation of stellar and nebular emission in wide ranges of observations. This approach relies on the Bayesian analysis of any type of galaxy spectral…
The spectral flux density of stars can indicate their atmospheric physical properties. A detector can obtain any band flux density at the design stage. However, the band flux density is confirmed and fixed in the process of operation…
The mass returned to the ambient medium by aging stellar populations over cosmological times sums up to a significant fraction (20% - 30% or more) of their initial mass. This continuous mass injection plays a fundamental role in phenomena…
Synthesis models predict the integrated properties of stellar populations. Several problems exist in this field, mostly related to the fact that integrated properties are distributed. To date, this aspect has been either ignored (as in…
In this review we address the uncertainties implicit in evolutionary synthesis model computations. After describing the general structure of synthesis codes, we discuss several source of uncertainties that may affect their results. In…
Context: The number of known strong gravitational lenses is expected to grow substantially in the next few years. The statistical combination of large samples of lenses has the potential of providing strong constraints on the inner…
The stellar line-of-sight velocity distribution (LOSVD) can be strongly asymmetric in regions where the light contributions of both disc and bulge in spiral and lenticular galaxies are comparable. Existing techniques for the stellar…
Galaxy formation and evolution is one of the most active areas of research in astronomy. In recent times there have been several developments on the observational fronts particularly with the discovery of several relations between galaxy…
Derived from first physical principles, a few simple rules are presented that can help in both the planning and interpretation of CCD and IR-array camera observations of resolvable stellar populations. These rules concern the overall size…
In this paper we present a novel method to identify and characterize stellar clusters deeply embedded in a dark molecular cloud. The method is based on measuring stellar surface density in wide-field infrared images using star counting…
Determining the mass of stars is crucial both to improving stellar evolution theory and to characterising exoplanetary systems. Asteroseismology offers a promising way to estimate stellar mean density. When combined with accurate radii…
Many aspects of the evolution of stars, and in particular the evolution of binary stars, remain beyond our ability to model them in detail. Instead, we rely on observations to guide our often phenomenological models and pin down uncertain…
For a number of reasons, the properties of integrated stellar populations are distributed. Traditional synthesis models usually return the mean value of such distribution, and a perfect fitting to observational data is sought for to infer…