Related papers: The Stellar Populations of Pixels and Frames
We discuss, from a statistical point of view, some leading issues that deal with the study of stellar populations in fully or partially unresolved aggregates, like globular clusters and distant galaxies. A confident assessment of the…
The study of stellar populations is a discipline that is highly dependent on both imaging and spectroscopy. I discuss techniques in different regimes of resolving power: broadband imaging (R~4), intermediate band imaging (R~16, 64),…
Determining the properties of old stellar populations (those with age >1 Gyr) has long involved the comparison of their integrated light, either in the form of photometry or spectroscopic indexes, with empirical or synthetic templates. Here…
It is currently impossible to determine the abundances and ages of the stellar populations of distant, dense stellar systems star by star. Therefore, methods to analyze the composite light of stellar systems are required. I review the…
The properties of stellar populations in the centers of 54 nearby lenticular galaxies are investigated by means of 2D spectroscopy, with the Multi-Pupil Spectrograph of the 6m telescope of SAO RAS; the unresolved nuclei and their…
In this paper, I review to what extent we can understand the photometric properties of star clusters, and of low-mass, unresolved galaxies, in terms of population synthesis models designed to describe `simple stellar populations' (SSPs),…
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 analysis of stellar populations has, by and large, been developed for two limiting cases: spatially-resolved stellar populations in the color-magnitude diagram, and integrated light observations of distant systems. In between these two…
We built modelled spectra of stellar population at high resolution and with variable alpha-elements enhancements. Analysing spectra of Galactic globular clusters we show that it is possible to derive reliably and efficiently [Mg/Fe] using…
Since the early 1970s, stellar population modelling has been one of the basic tools for understanding the physics of unresolved systems from observation of their integrated light. Models allow us to relate the integrated spectra (or…
It is currently impossible to determine the abundances of stellar populations star-by-star in dense stellar systems more distant than a few megaparsecs. Therefore, methods to analyse the composite light of stellar systems are required. I…
The stellar populations of galaxies contain a wealth of detailed information. From the youngest, most massive stars, to almost invisible remnants, the history of star formation is encoded in the stars that make up a galaxy. Extracting some,…
The apparent age and mass of a stellar cluster can be strongly affected by stochastic sampling of the stellar initial mass function, when inferred from the integrated color of low mass clusters (less than ~10^4 solar masses). We use…
The existence of star-to-star light-element abundance variations in massive Galactic and extragalactic star clusters has fairly recently superseded the traditional paradigm of individual clusters hosting stars with the same age, and uniform…
Combining population synthesis models with simple Montecarlo simulations of stochastic effects in the number of stars occupying sparsely populated stellar evolutionary phases in the HRD, I show that the scatter observed in the photometric…
The fundamental properties of stellar clusters, such as the age or the total initial mass in stars, are often inferred from population synthesis models. The predicted properties are then used to constrain the physical mechanisms involved in…
We present BVI CCD photometry for more than 10,000 stars in the innermost region (0.3' < r <~ 4') of the globular cluster M 3. When added to the previous photographic photometry by Buonanno et al. (1994) reaching as far as r ~ 7', this…
We look for very low-mass members in open clusters with different ages placed at different distances. The main goal is to produce a reliable census of low-mass stars for each of the clusters and derive the Initial Mass Function. To achieve…
The images provided by the Advanced Camera for Surveys at the Hubble Space Telescope (ACS/HST) have the amazing spacial resolution of 0".05/pixel. Therefore, it is possible to resolve individual stars in nearby galaxies and, in particular,…
Variations in the photometric parameters of stellar systems as a function of their evolution and the stellar populations comprising them are investigated. A set of seven evolutionary models with an exponential decrease in the star-formation…