Re-evaluating old stellar populations

By E. Stanway, J. Eldridge. 2018

298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 we reevaluate the properties of old stellar populations using a new set of stellar population synthesis models, designed to incorporate the effects of binary stellar evolution pathways as a function of stellar mass and age. We find that single-aged stellar population models incorporating binary stars, as well as new stellar evolution and atmosphere models, can reproduce the colours and spectral indices observed in both globular clusters and quiescent galaxies. The best fitting model populations are often younger than those derived from older spectral synthesis models, and may also lie at slightly higher metallicities.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15fb8708396858cd79724ced8d8a58a49e5c1da3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Dunlop
2. R. McLure
3. P. Oesch
4. C. Conroy
5. Richard S. Ellis
6. D. McLeod
7. D. Magee
8. R. Bouwens

In Instrumentation

1. J. Dunlop
2. R. McLure
3. P. Oesch
4. C. Conroy
5. D. Magee
6. D. McLeod
7. Richard S. Ellis
8. Thomas Targett

Citations in the corpus

• Rapid Reionization by the Oligarchs: The Case for Massive, UV-bright, Star-forming Galaxies with High Escape Fractions (2019, result): “Swapping the MIST models for those that explicitly include binaries (BPASS, Stanway & Eldridge 2018), or a Chabrier (2003) IMF, or a model with evolving metallicity make no appreciable difference to our results.”
• The evolution of the galaxy UV luminosity function at redshifts z ≃ 8 – 15 from deep JWST and ground-based near-infrared imaging (2022, background): “2.1; Stanway & Eldridge 2018), including binary evolution, with an upper IMF mass limit of 300M .”
• COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, methodology): “…1995; Nelson & Eggleton 2001), the Brussels population number synthesis code, PNS (De Donder & Vanbeveren 2004), BINSTAR (Siess et al. 2013), MESA (Paxton et al. 2011, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2019), or BPASS (Eldridge & Stanway 2016; Stanway et al. 2016; Eldridge et al. 2017; Stanway & Eldridge 2018).”
• A z = 0 Multiwavelength Galaxy Synthesis. I. A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies (2019, background): “…the near-IR mass to light ratio increases with the age of a stellar population (e.g., Bell & de Jong 2001; Bell et al. 2003; Courteau et al. 2014; Stanway & Eldridge 2018) and low mass star-forming galaxies show systematically younger stellar populations than high mass star-forming galaxies…”