Speaker
Polychronis Papaderos
(Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto)
Description
Despite significant progress over the past decades, all
state-of-the-art population spectral synthesis (pss) codes
suffer from two major conceptual deficiencies that limit
their potential of gaining sharp insights into the star
formation history (SFH) of star-forming (SF) galaxies and
potentially introduce substantial biases in studies of their
physical properties (e.g., stellar mass and sSFR): i) the
neglect of nebular continuum emission in spectral fits and
ii) the lack of a mechanism that ensures consistency between
the best-fitting SFH and the observed nebular emission
characteristics (e.g., hydrogen Balmer-line luminosities and
equivalent widths-EWs, shape of the continuum in the region
around the Balmer and Paschen jump). FADO (Fitting Analysis
using Differential evolution Optimization; Gomes & Papaderos
2016, submitted) is a conceptually novel, publicly available
(http://www.spectralsynthesis.org) pss code with the
distinctive capability of permitting identification of the
SFH that best reproduces the observed nebular
characteristics of a SF galaxy. This so far unique
self-consistency concept allows to significantly alleviate
degeneracies in spectral synthesis, thereby opening a new
avenue to the detailed exploration of the assembly history
of galaxies. FADO is the first pss code employing genetic
Differential Evolution Optimization. This, in conjunction
with various other currently unique elements in its
mathematical concept and numerical realization results in
key improvements with respect to computational efficiency
and uniqueness of the best-fitting SFHs. An outline of FADO
and illustrative examples of its application on SDSS spectra
will be presented.
Primary author
Polychronis Papaderos
(Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto)
