A Method for Determining the Star Formation History of a Mixed Stellar Population

We present results of a study aiming at shedding light on the specific advantages and limitations of methods to derive star formation histories (SFH) in galaxies using resolved stellar populations and using integrated light, respectively. For this purpose, we analyse the integrated-light spectrum of a field in the LMC bar, for which highly resolved HST images are available as well. To be compared with the SFH derived from the color magnitude diagram (CMD) of this field (Smeck...

A comprehensive study of the measurement of star formation histories from colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) is presented, with an emphasis on a variety of subtle issues involved in the generation of model CMDs and maximum likelihood solution. Among these are the need for a complete sampling of the synthetic CMD, the use of of proper statistics for dealing with Poisson-distributed data (and a demonstration of why chi-square must not be used), measuring full uncertainties in all...

We present a new method to determine the star formation and metal enrichment histories of any resolved stellar system. This method is based on the fact that any observed star in a colour-magnitude diagram will have a certain probability of being associated with an isochrone characterised by an age t and metallicity [Fe/H] (i.e. to have formed at the time and with the metallicity of that isochrone). We formulate this as a maximum likelihood problem that is then solved with a g...

We discuss new photometry from high-resolution images of 7 intermediate-age (1-2 Gyr) star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope. We fit color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) with several different sets of theoretical isochrones, and determine systematic uncertainties for population parameters when derived using any one set of isochrones. The cluster CMDs show several interesting features, including ext...

We present a comprehensive study of the applications of the pixel color-magnitude diagram (pCMD) technique for measuring star formation histories (SFHs) and other stellar population parameters of galaxies, and demonstrate that the technique can also constrain distances. SFHs have previously been measured through either the modeling of resolved-star CMDs or of integrated-light SEDs, yet neither approach can easily be applied to galaxies in the "semi-resolved regime". The pCMD ...

This work presents an approach (fitCMD) designed to obtain a comprehensive set of astrophysical parameters from colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of star clusters. Based on initial mass function (IMF) properties taken from isochrones, fitCMD searches for the values of total (or cluster) stellar mass, age, global metallicity, foreground reddening, distance modulus, and magnitude-dependent photometric completeness that produce the artificial CMD that best reproduces the observed...

The aim of this work is to test to what extent the star cluster population of a galaxy can be utilised to constrain or estimate the star formation history, with the Large Magellanic Cloud as our testbed. We follow two methods to extract information about the star formation rate from star clusters, either using only the most massive clusters (Maschberger & Kroupa 2007) or using the whole cluster population, albeit this is only possible for a shorter age span. We compare these ...

The basic assumptions behind Population Synthesis and Spectral Evolution models are reviewed. The numerical problems encountered by the standard population synthesis technique when applied to models with truncated star formation rates are described. The Isochrone Synthesis algorithm is introduced as a means to circumvent these problems. A summary of results from the application of this algorithm to model galaxy spectra by Bruzual and Charlot (1993, 2000) follows. I present a ...

We present a Bayesian method to determine simultaneously the age, metallicity, distance modulus, and interstellar reddening by dust of any resolved stellar population, by comparing the observed and synthetic color magnitude diagrams on a star by star basis, with no need to bin the data into a carefully selected magnitude grid. We test the method with mock stellar populations, and show that it works correctly even for scarce stellar populations with only one or two hundred sta...

The evolution of the star formation rate in the Galaxy is one of the key ingredients quantifying the formation and determining the chemical and luminosity evolution of galaxies. Many complementary methods exist to infer the star formation history of the components of the Galaxy, from indirect methods for analysis of low-precision data, to new exact analytic methods for analysis of sufficiently high quality data. We summarise available general constraints on star formation his...