VESPA · The Formation Histories of Galaxies

The primary objective of this research project is to determine accurately the star formation and metallicity histories of individual galaxies to obtain further clues on the formation and evolution of galaxies. The main goal is to answer the following questions: how do galaxies with different star formation histories relate to their present environments? how is the inter-galactic medium enriched as a function of time? which galaxies produce most of the metals and in which environments do they live in? is ""downsizing"" a function of environment? are the host galaxies of supernova type Ia galaxies special? is there any correlation between the progenitor of type-Ia delay time and metallicity? Depending on the quality of the spectrum (wavelength coverage and signal-to-noise ratio) of the stellar populations of galaxies, some spectra contain more information than others about their past history. It is this information that will be accurately recovered. The PI group has developed MOPED, an algorithm that statistically recovers the star formation and metallicity histories of galaxies. They have also developed a new algorithm (VESPA) that determines for each individual galaxy how much information is possible to recover and recoveres it. They wish to use this new tool to recover the above information from galaxies.""