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

By J. Harris, Dennis Zaritsky. 2001

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a method to determine the star formation history of a mixed stellar population from its photometry. We perform a χ2 minimization between the observed photometric distribution and a model photometric distribution, based on theoretical isochrones. The initial mass function, distance modulus, interstellar reddening, binary fraction, and photometric errors are incorporated into the model, making it directly comparable to the data. The model is a linear combination of individual synthetic color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs), each of which represents the predicted photometric distribution of a stellar population of a given age and metallicity. While the method is similar to existing synthetic CMD algorithms, we describe several key improvements in our implementation. In particular, we focus on the derivation of accurate error estimates on the star formation history to enable comparisons between such histories, either from different objects or from different regions of a single object. We present extensive tests of the algorithm, using both simulated and actual photometric data. From a preliminary application of the algorithm to a subregion of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), we find that the that the lull in star formation observed among the LMC's cluster population between 3 and 8 Gyr ago is also present in the field population. The method was designed with flexibility and generality in mind, and we make the code available for use by the astronomical community.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dccb200b92ff59a26e3709ed5cb155606a791a94

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Conroy
2. Jay Anderson
3. Aaron Dotter
4. S. Majewski
5. A. Sarajedini
6. R. P. van der Marel
7. G. Piotto
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In Instrumentation

1. C. Conroy
2. Jay Anderson
3. J. J. Dalcanton
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5. Aaron Dotter
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7. A. Sarajedini
8. A. Aparicio

Citations in the corpus

• THE ACS NEARBY GALAXY SURVEY TREASURY. VIII. THE GLOBAL STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF 60 DWARF GALAXIES IN THE LOCAL VOLUME (2011, methodology): “…algorithms (e.g., Tosi et al. 1989; Tolstoy & Saha 1996; Gallart et al. 1996; Mighell 1997; Holtzman et al. 1999; Hernandez et al. 1999; Harris & Zaritsky 2001; Dolphin 2002; Ikuta & Arimoto 2002; Cole et al. 2007; Yuk & Lee 2007; Aparicio & Hidalgo 2009; Cignoni & Tosi 2010) have been…”
• The ACS Survey of Galactic Globular Clusters: M54 and Young Populations in the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy (2007, methodology): “Using the isochrones fit in § 3, we reconstructed the star formation history (SFH) of the M54 field using the StarFISH population synthesis code (Harris & Zaritsky 2001).”
• AGE DETERMINATION OF SIX INTERMEDIATE-AGE SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD STAR CLUSTERS WITH HST/ACS (2008, unknown): “In the LMC, two epochs of cluster formation have been observed that are separated by an ”age gap” of about 4-9 Gyr (e.g., Holtzman et al. 1999; Johnson et al. 1999; Harris & Zaritsky 2001).”
• The Detailed Star Formation History in the Spheroid, Outer Disk, and Tidal Stream of the Andromeda Galaxy (2006, methodology): “…allows groups of neighboring isochrones to be locked such that their amplitudes vary together; one of these isochrone groups is treated as a single isochrone as far as the fitting is concerned, even if its stars span a small range in age and metallicity (see Harris & Zaritsky 2001 for details).”
• THE QUENCHING OF THE ULTRA-FAINT DWARF GALAXIES IN THE REIONIZATION ERA (2014, methodology): “Each synthetic CMD was constructed using theSYNTH routine of Harris & Zaritsky (2001), which takes the isochrone library and artificial star tests as input.”
• THE STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF LOCAL GROUP DWARF GALAXIES. I. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/WIDE FIELD PLANETARY CAMERA 2 OBSERVATIONS (2014, background): “Cumulative SFHs also minimize many of the issues that affect interpreting absolute SFHs, e.g., interpreting covariant SFRs in adjacent time bins and defining an appropriate time resolution (e.g., Harris & Zaritsky 2001; Dolphin 2002; McQuinn et al. 2010b).”
• CONVERTING FROM 3.6 AND 4.5 μm FLUXES TO STELLAR MASS (2012, methodology): “Uncertainties over long times appear to be well controlled, as exemplified by tests done by Harris & Zaritsky (2001) using globular clusters, the global patterns in the star formation history seen in the LMC, and the correspondence of certain features in the star formation histories of the LMC and…”
• Is the SMC Bound to the LMC? The Hubble Space Telescope Proper Motion of the SMC (2006, background): “In return, the MW has had a major influence on the Clouds’ development, including their star formation history (Holtzman et al. 1997; Harris & Zaritsky 2001; Smecker-Hane et al. 2002), structural and chemical evolution (Mathewson et al. 1986; Bekki & Chiba 2005), and kinematics (Hatzidimitriou et…”
• The Adequacy of Stellar Evolution Models for the Interpretation of the Color-Magnitude Diagrams of Resolved Stellar Populations (2005, unknown): “…& Saha (1996); Dolphin (1997); Dohm-Palmer et al. (1997); Hurley-Keller, Mateo & Nemec (1998); Gallart et al. (1999a); Hernández, Valls-Gabaud, & Gilmore (1999); Holtzman et al. (1999); Olsen (1999); Harris & Zaritsky (2001); Frayn & Gilmore (2002); Ng et al. (2002); Smecker-Hane et al. (2002).”
• THE STAR FORMATION HISTORY OF THE LARGE MAGELLANIC CLOUD (2009, methodology): “StarFISH (Harris & Zaritsky 2001) is the software package that we created specifically for the syntheticCMD SFH analysis of our MCPS data.”
• THE NATURE OF STARBURSTS. I. THE STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF EIGHTEEN NEARBY STARBURST DWARF GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “Methodology for Reconstructing SFHs SFH recovery programs are sophisticated tools that use stellar evolutionary theories to recon- struct past rates of SF (e.g., Tosi et al. 1989; Tolstoy & Saha 1996; Gallart et al. 1996; Holtzman et al. 1999; Dolphin 2002; Harris & Zaritsky 2001).”
• The Star Formation History of the Small Magellanic Cloud (2003, unknown): “1531 reconstruction program (Harris & Zaritsky 2001) in x 2.1.”
• Spitzer SAGE Survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud. II. Evolved Stars and Infrared Color-Magnitude Diagrams (2006, unknown): “Several studies have derived detailed SFHs in the LMC from a variety of field locations and clusters (Holtzman et al. 1999; Olsen 1999) using principally optical color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) and sophisticated stellar models and fitting techniques (e.g., Harris & Zaritsky 2001).”
• IAC-STAR: A Code for Synthetic Color-Magnitude Diagram Computation (2004, methodology): “Other codes have been developed by different groups for the computation of synthetic CMDs (see Tolstoy & Saha 1996; Dolphin 1997; Holtzman et al. 1999; Ardeberg et al. 1997; Stappers et al. 1997; Dohm-Palmer et al. 1997; Hernández et al. 1999; Harris & Zaritsky 2001).”
• Stellar Population Inference with Prospector (2020, background): “…– actually many-parameter – models have become the standard in SFH inference from (semi-) resolved stellar color-magnitude diagrams (e.g., Dolphin 1997; Harris & Zaritsky 2001; Weisz et al. 2011; Cook et al. 2019) and have been used in maximum-likelihood “inversion” codes for unresolved spectra…”
• Numerical methods of star formation history measurement and applications to seven dwarf spheroidals (2001, unknown): “The number of groups working on this topic continues to increase; Tolstoy & Saha (1996); Holtzman et al. (1999); Olsen (1999); Hernandez, Gilmore, & Valls-Gabaud (2000); and Harris & Zaritsky (2001) is only a partial list of other groups that are using CMDs to measure past star formation histories.”