| Grant number: | 18/05392-8 |
| Support Opportunities: | Regular Research Grants |
| Start date: | June 01, 2018 |
| End date: | November 30, 2020 |
| Field of knowledge: | Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Astronomy - Stellar Astrophysics |
| Principal Investigator: | Paula Rodrigues Teixeira Coelho |
| Grantee: | Paula Rodrigues Teixeira Coelho |
| Host Institution: | Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas (IAG). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil |
| City of the host institution: | São Paulo |
Abstract
Stellar population (SP) models are invaluable to modern Extragalactic Astrophysics. They provide means to extract stellar masses, dust content, star formation and chemical enrichment histories of galaxies from their integrated spectral energy distributions, colours or spectra. We have pioneered the publication of high resolution spectral models with variable abundance patterns in Coelho et al. (2007), and further expanded them in Walcher et al. 2009; Coelho et al. 2011; Vazdekis et al. 2015). Abundance patterns are a keystone to understand galaxy evolution, as the chemical composition of stars in a galaxy encloses valuable information about the past histories of star formation, which in turn are clues to the baryonic cycle linking galaxies to their environment in a hierarchical universe. In this project we propose to: (1) expand the stellar library by Coelho (2014) in metallicity range and towards the infrared wavelength window; (2) use the new stellar spectra to expand the age, abundance and wavelength ranges of our SP models; and (3) incorporate the resulting models into the BEAGLE spectral-fitting tool (Chevallard & Charlot, 2016) to study selected samples of star clusters in the Galaxy and the Magellanic Cloud, and of different types of local galaxies. We will also perform a principal-component-analysis of fit residuals to separate the observed spectra into different 'residual classes', related to different chemical-abundance variations. The expected outcomes of this project are improved high-resolution spectral SP models, and valuable new insight into the variation of chemical abundances of stars in local galaxies, building the basis for a future, physically motivated development of SP models with multiple chemical parameters. (AU)
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