Related papers: Stellar Content and Star Formation Histories
The age and chemical composition of the stars in present-day galaxies carry important clues about their star formation processes. The latest generation of population synthesis models have allowed to derive age and stellar metallicity…
In these lectures I present a highly opinionated review of the observed patterns of metallicity and element abundance ratios in nearby spiral, irregular, and dwarf elliptical galaxies, with connection to a number of astrophysical issues…
In the current galaxy formation scenarios, two physical phenomena are invoked to build disk galaxies: hierarchical mergers and more quiescent external gas accretion, coming from intergalactic filaments. Although both are thought to play a…
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…
Thanks to the capabilities of modern telescopes and instrumentation, it is now possible to resolve single stars in external dwarf galaxies, provided they are bright enough. For galactic regions with deep enough photometry, detailed…
This review aims to give an overview of the contribution of the Hubble Space Telescope to our understanding of the detailed properties of Local Group dwarf galaxies and their older stellar populations. The exquisite stable high spatial…
Growing evidence shows that most stars in the Milky Way, including the Sun, are born in high-mass star-forming regions, but due to both observational and theoretical challenges, our understanding of their chemical evolution is much less…
Galaxy formation is at the heart of our understanding of cosmic evolution. Although there is a consensus that galaxies emerged from the expanding matter background by gravitational instability of primordial fluctuations, a number of…
I will present recent theoretical results on the formation and the high redshift assembly of spheroids. These findings have been obtained by utilising different and complementary techniques: chemodynamical models offer great insight in the…
Irregular (Irr) galaxies are gas-rich objects with recent or ongoing star formation. In absence of spiral density waves, star formation occurs largely stochastically. The scattered star-forming regions tend to be long-lived and migrate…
Massive stars have a profound influence on the Universe, but their formation remains poorly understood. We review the current status of observational and theoretical research in this field, describing the various stages of an evolutionary…
How do galaxies form and evolve? This is one of the most puzzling questions in astronomy. Galaxy assembly takes place throughout the entire history of the Universe, but our understanding of it is hampered by the unfortunate fact that we can…
Studying the evolution of dwarf galaxies can provide insights into the characteristics of systems that can act as building blocks of massive galaxies. This paper discusses the history of star formation and gas flows (inflow and outflow) of…
We have computed the time evolution of bolometric, far-infrared, Halpha line, ultraviolet (both intrinsic and escaping the star forming region) and the nonthermal radio continuum luminosities for continuous and constant star formation. The…
I discuss the information provided by color-magnitude diagrams of different absolute magnitude limits in the study of the star formation histories of nearby galaxies. I review the recent progress made in the field, with emphasis on the…
This article outlines a method to interpret the extragalactic background light in terms of the large-scale, average properties of galaxies, including the comoving densities of stars and interstellar gas, metals, and dust. These quantities…
Correlations between stellar kinematics and chemical abundances are fossil evidence for evolutionary connections between Galactic structural components. Extensive stellar surveys show that the only tolerably clear distinction between…
These notes collect together current work on the effect of the environment on galaxy formation and evolution. They are broken into four distinct parts. The first deals with the observational debate surrounding the question of whether…
Globular clusters are large and dense agglomerate of stars. At variance with smaller clusters of stars, they exhibit signs of some chemical evolution. At least for this reason, they are intermediate between open clusters and massive objects…
We compute the chemical evolution of the Galactic bulge in the context of an inside-out model for the formation of the Milky Way. The model contains updated stellar yields from massive stars. The main purpose of the paper is to compare the…