Recovering fossil records from galaxy spectra using a 2D Dynamical Base

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1998

Galaxy spectra are a rich source of kinematical information since the shapes of the absorption lines reflect the movement of stars along the line-of-sight. We present a technique to directly build a dynamical model for a galaxy by fitting model spectra, calculated from a dynamical model, to the observed galaxy spectra. Using synthetic spectra from a known galaxy model we demonstrate that this technique indeed recovers the essential dynamical characteristics of the galaxy model. Moreover, the method allows a statistically meaningful error analysis on the resulting dynamical quantities.

2009

Retrieving the Star Formation History (SFH) of a galaxy out of its integrated spectrum is the central goal of stellar population synthesis. Recent advances in evolutionary synthesis models have given new breath to this old field of research. Modern spectral synthesis techniques incorporating these advances now allow the fitting of galaxy spectra on an Å-by-Å. These detailed fits are useful for a number of studies, like emission line, stellar kinematics, and specially galaxy evolution. Applications of this semi-empirical approach to mega data sets are teaching us a lot about the lives of galaxies. The STARLIGHT spectral synthesis code is one of the tools which allows one to harness this favorable combination of plentifulness of data and models. To illustrate this, we show how SFHs vary across classical emission line diagnostic diagrams. Systematic trends are present along both the star-forming and active-galaxy sequences. We also briefly describe experiments with new versions of evol...

Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society, 2001

We derive physical parameters of galaxies from their observed spectrum, using MOPED, the optimized data compression algorithm of Heavens, Jimenez & Lahav 2000. Here we concentrate on parametrising galaxy properties, and apply the method to the NGC galaxies in Kennicutt's spectral atlas. We focus on deriving the star formation history, metallicity and dust content of galaxies. The method is very fast, taking a few seconds of CPU time to estimate 17 parameters, and so specially suited to study of large data sets, such as the Anglo-Australian 2 degree field galaxy survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Without the power of MOPED, the recovery of star formation histories in these surveys would be impractical. In the Kennicutt atlas, we find that for the spheroidals a small recent burst of star formation is required to provide the best fit to the spectrum. There is clearly a need for theoretical stellar atmospheric models with spectral resolution better than 1\AA if we are to extract all the rich information that large redshift surveys contain in their galaxy spectra.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2007

We introduce VErsatile SPectral Analysis (VESPA): a new method which aims to recover robust star formation and metallicity histories from galactic spectra. VESPA uses the full spectral range to construct a galaxy history from synthetic models. We investigate the use of an adaptative parametrization grid to recover reliable star formation histories on a galaxy-by-galaxy basis. Our goal is robustness as opposed to high resolution histories, and the method is designed to return high time resolution only where the data demand it. In this paper we detail the method and we present our findings when we apply VESPA to synthetic and real Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic data. We show that the number of parameters that can be recovered from a spectrum depends strongly on the signal-to-noise, wavelength coverage and presence or absence of a young population. For a typical SDSS sample of galaxies, we can normally recover between 2 to 5 stellar populations. We find very good agreement between VESPA and our previous analysis of the SDSS sample with MOPED.

Proceedings of the International …, 2009

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, or all, of this information has long been a goal of stellar population studies. This was achieved in the last couple of decades and it is now a routine task, which forms a crucial ingredient in much of observational galaxy evolution, from our Galaxy out to the most distant systems found. In many of these domains we are now limited not by sample size, but by systematic uncertainties and this will increasingly be the case in the future.

The Astronomical Journal, 2007

Stellar evolution tracks and isochrones are key inputs for a wide range of astrophysical studies; in particular, they are essential to the interpretation of photometric and spectroscopic observations of resolved and unresolved stellar populations. We have made available to the astrophysical community a large, homogenous database of up-to-date stellar tracks and isochrones, and a set of programs useful in population synthesis studies. In this paper we first summarize the main properties of our stellar model database (BaSTI) already introduced in Pietrinferni et al. (2004) and Pietrinferni et al. (2006). We then discuss an important update of the database, i.e., the extension of all stellar models and isochrones until the end of the thermal pulses along the Asymptotic Giant Branch. This extension of the library is particularly relevant for stellar population analyses in the near-infrared, or longer wavelengths, where the contribution to the integrated photometric properties by cool and bright Asymptotic Giant Branch stars is significant. A few comparisons with empirical data are also presentend and briefly discussed. We then present three web-tools that allow an interactive access to the database, and make possible to compute user-specified evolutionary tracks, isochrones, stellar luminosity functions, plus synthetic Color-Magnitude-Diagrams and integrated magnitudes for arbitrary Star Formation Histories. All these web tools are available at the BaSTI database official site: http://www.oa-teramo.inaf.it/BASTI.

2003

We present a determination of the 'Cosmic Optical Spectrum' of the Universe, i.e. the ensemble emission from galaxies, as determined from the red-selected Sloan Digital Sky Survey main galaxy sample and compare with previous results of the blue-selected 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. Broadly we find good agreement in both the spectrum and the derived star-formation histories. If we use a power-law star-formation history model where star-formation rate ∝ (1+z) β out to z = 1, then we find that β of 2 to 3 is still the most likely model and there is no evidence for current surveys missing large amounts of star formation at high redshift. In particular 'Fossil Cosmology' of the local universe gives measures of starformation history which are consistent with direct observations at high redshift. Using the photometry of SDSS we are able to derive the cosmic spectrum in absolute units (i.e. WÅ −1 Mpc −3 ) at 2-5Å resolution and find good agreement with published broad-band luminosity densities. For a Salpeter IMF the best fit stellar mass/light ratio is 3.7-7.5 M ⊙ /L ⊙ in the r-band (corresponding to Ω stars h = 0.0025-0.0055) and from both the stellar emission history and the Hα luminosity density independently we find a cosmological star-formation rate of 0.03-0.04 h M ⊙ yr −1 Mpc −3 today.

Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society, 2003

Using MOPED we determine non-parametrically the star-formation and metallicity history of over 37,000 high-quality galaxy spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) early data release. We use the entire spectral range, rather than concentrating on specific features, and we estimate the complete star formation history without prior assumptions about its form (by constructing so-called `population boxes'). The main results of this initial study are that the star formation rate in SDSS galaxies has been in decline for ~6 Gyr; a metallicity distribution for star-forming gas which is peaked ~3 Gyr ago at about solar metallicity, inconsistent with closed-box models, but consistent with infall models. We also determine the infall rate of gas in SDSS and show that it has been significant for the last 3 Gyr. We investigate errors using a Monte-Carlo Markov Chain algorithm. Further, we demonstrate that recovering star formation and metallicity histories for such a large sample becomes intractable without data compression methods, particularly the exploration of the likelihood surface. By exploring the whole likelihood surface we show that age-metallicity degeneracies are not as severe as by using only a few spectral features. We find that 65% of galaxies contain a significant old population (with an age of at least 8 Gyr), including recent starburst galaxies, and that over 97% have some stars older than 2 Gyr. It is the first time that the past star formation history has been determined from the fossil record of the present-day spectra of galaxies.

Arxiv preprint astro-ph/ …, 2004

The study of stellar populations in galaxies is entering a new era with the availability of large and high quality databases of both observed galactic spectra and state-of-theart evolutionary synthesis models. In this paper we investigate the power of spectral synthesis as a mean to estimate physical properties of galaxies. Spectral synthesis is nothing more than the decomposition of an observed spectrum in terms of a superposition of a base of simple stellar populations of various ages and metallicities, producing as output the star-formation and chemical histories of a galaxy, its extinction and velocity dispersion. Our implementation of this method uses the Bruzual & Charlot (2003) models and observed spectra in the 3650-8000Å range. The reliability of this approach is studied by three different means: (1) simulations, (2) comparison with previous work based on a different technique, and (3) analysis of the consistency of results obtained for a sample of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

Galaxies, 2016

Fossil systems are understood to be the end product of galaxy mergers within groups and clusters. Their halo morphology points to their relaxed/virialised nature, thus allowing them to be employed as observational probes for the evolution of cosmic structures, their thermodynamics and dark matter distribution. Cosmological simulations, and their underlying models, are broadly consistent with the early formation epoch for fossils. In a series of studies we have looked into galaxy properties and intergalactic medium (IGM) in fossils, across a wide range of wavelengths, from X-ray through optical to the radio, to have a better understanding of their nature, the attributed halo age, IGM heating and their AGNs and use them as laboratories to constrain galaxy formation models. Adhering to one of less attended properties of fossils, using the the Millennium Simulation, we combine luminosity gap with luminosity segregation (the brightest galaxy offset from the group luminosity centroid) to identify the most dynamically relaxed galaxy groups which allows us to reveal brand new observational connections between galaxies and their environments.