http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.01461
The combination of spectroscopic stellar metallicities and resolved star color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) has the potential to constrain the entire star formation and chemical enrichment history (SFH) of a galaxy better than fitting CMDs alone (as is most common in SFH studies using resolved stellar populations). In this paper, two approaches for incorporating external metallicity information into color-magnitude diagram fitting techniques are presented. Overall, the joint fitting of metallicity and CMD information can increase the precision on measured age-metallicity relationships and star formation rates by ~10% over CMD fitting alone. However, systematics in stellar isochrones and mismatches between spectroscopic and photometric metallicity determinations can reduce the accuracy of the recovered SFHs. I present a simple mitigation of these systematics that can reduce the amplitude of these systematics to the level obtained from CMD fitting alone, while ensuring the age-metallicity relationship is consistent with spectroscopic metallicities. As is the case in CMD-fitting analysis, improved stellar models and calibrations between spectroscopic and photometric metallicities are currently the primary impediment to gains in SFH precision from jointly fitting stellar metallicities and CMDs.
A. Dolphin
Fri, 6 May 16
15/60
Comments: 12 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal