Related papers: Stellar Content and Star Formation Histories
The abundance patterns of metal-poor stars provide us a wealth of chemical information about various stages of cosmic chemical evolution. In particular, these stars allow us to study the formation and evolution of the elements, and the…
Understanding the galaxy in which we live is one of the great intellectual challenges facing modern science. With the advent of high quality observational data, the chemical evolution modeling of our galaxy has been the subject of numerous…
Nearly a century after the true nature of galaxies as distant "island universes" was established, their origin and evolution remain great unsolved problems of modern astrophysics. One of the most promising ways to investigate galaxy…
I discuss current observational constraints on the star-formation and stellar-assembly histories of galaxies at high redshifts. The data on massive galaxies at z<1 implies that their stellar populations formed at z>2, and that their…
Surveys of the local and distant Universe are the means to test and improve our models of galaxy formation. Substantial successes in the models are evident, while there is also considerable recent progress in identifying what remains to be…
Theories of how galaxies, the fundamental constituents of large-scale structure, form and evolve have undergone a dramatic paradigm shift in the last few decades. Earlier views were of rapid, early collapse and formation of basic…
Over the past 10 years abundant evidence has emerged that many (if not all) stars are born with circumstellar disks. Understanding the evolution of post-accretion disks can provide strong constraints on theories of planet formation and…
We summarise the results of recent work investigating the effects of stellar yields which take into account rotation on the predictions of chemical evolution models for early populations of galaxies.
A simple chemical enrichment code is described where the two basic mechanisms driving the evolution of the ages and metallicities of the stellar populations are the star formation efficiency and the fraction of gas ejected from the galaxy.…
Rotation has a number of important effects on the evolution of stars. Apart from structural changes because of the centrifugal force, turbulent mixing and meridional circulation caused by rotation can dramatically affect a star's chemical…
Stellar photometry of nearby irregular galaxies of the Local Group is used to identify and study the young and old stellar populations of these galaxies. An analysis of the spatial distributions of stars of different ages in face-on…
Galaxies evolve via a complex interaction of numerous different physical processes, scales and components. In spite of this, overall trends often appear. Simplified models for galaxy histories can be used to search for and capture such…
During the last decade, the understanding of fine features of the structure and evolution of stars has become possible as a result of enormous progress made in the acquisition of high-quality observational and experimental data and of new…
In these lectures I review observations of star-forming molecular clouds in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies to develop a physical intuition for understanding star formation in the local and high-redshift Universe. A lot of this material is…
Initial conditions are set by Big bang nucleosynthesis from which we know that 90 per cent of baryons are dark and have essentially unknown chemical composition. In our own Galaxy, there are many clues from individual stars in different…
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 rate of star formation varies between galaxy types and evolves with redshift. Most stars in the universe have formed in episodes of an exceptionally high star-forming activity, commonly called a starburst. We here summarize basic…
In this work, we study the formation and chemical evolution of the Galactic bulge with particular focus on the abundance pattern ([Mg/Fe] vs. [Fe/H]), metallicity and age distribution functions. We consider detailed chemical evolution…
Any realistic theory of galaxy formation must be set in the context of a model for the formation of structure in the universe. We describe a powerful approach -- semi-analytic modelling -- that combines a set of simple rules describing the…
The aim of this paper is to cast light on the formation and evolution of elliptical galaxies by means of N-body/hydro-dynamical simulations that include star formation, feed-back and chemical evolution. Particular attention is paid to the…