Important Progress in Modeling Stellar Populations
Prof. Dr. Zhongmu Li
We have gained important progress on modeling stellar populations of galaxies and star clusters by building a new binary star composite stellar population synthesis model. Our model have taken the observational evidence about the larger fraction of binary stars in galaxies and multibursts in galaxies into account. Our model is able to well explain the UV upturn of SEDs of elliptical galaxies, and special stars like blue stragglers.
Our new model is of more physical basis comparing to previous single star simple stellar population models and binary star simple stellar population models. It can therefore be used for a lot of astronomy studies, e.g., the determination of distance, mass, redenning, age, and metallicity of galaxies and star clusters. Our team is using this new model to study some galaxies in detail.
One can read the paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.1904.