Reconstructing Star Formation Histories of Galaxies

Abstract

We present a methodological study to find out how far back and to what precision star formation histories of galaxies can be reconstructed from CMDs, from integrated spectra and Lick indices, and from integrated multi-band photometry. Our evolutionary synthesis models GALEV allow to describe the evolution of galaxies in terms of all three approaches and we have assumed typical observational uncertainties for each of them and then investigated to what extent and accuracy different star formation histories can be discriminated. For a field in the LMC bar region with both a deep CMD from HST observations and a trailing slit spectrum across exactly the same field of view we could test our modelling results against real data.