Lessons learned in the history and philosophy of science have generally had little immediate impact on how we as individual astronomers conduct our research. And yet we do share many common views on how we undertake basic research, and how we translate observations and theory into communicable knowledge. In this introductory talk I will illustrate how we as extragalactic astronomers have already violated some of the basic tenets of what constitutes “science” as seen from a philosophical point of view, and I will predict what the future of astronomy as a science may soon look like. Simple examples of how we are already “cognitively closed” to many immediate and tangible aspects of the Universe will be given and some solutions to this dilemma will be proposed. We may be at a point in time where more data is not necessarily the best solution to our problems. Discovering that familiar concepts and even certain objects may not exist in the traditional sense of the word could provide a motivation for broadening our way of conceptualizing the extragalactic Universe, more as a continuum of processes and phase transitions rather than an assembly of discrete objects. Once again the Universe may be “forcing us to think”.

The current state-of-the-art of population synthesis is reviewed. The field is currently undergoing major revisions with the recognition of several key processes as new critical ingredients. Stochastic effects can artificially enhance or suppress certain evolutionary phases and/or stellar mass regimes and introduce systematic biases in, e.g., the determination of the stellar initial mass function. Post-main-sequence evolution is often associated with irregular variations of stellar properties on ultra-short time-scales. Examples are asymptotic giant branch stars and luminous blue variables, both of which are poorly treated in the models. Stars rarely form in isolation, and the fraction of truly single stars may be very small. Therefore, stellar multiplicity must be accounted for since many systems will develop tidal interaction over the course of their evolution. Last but not least, stellar rotation can drastically increase stellar temperatures and luminosities, which in turn leads to revised mass-to-light ratios in population synthesis models.

Element abundance ratios hold important clues to understanding the evolution of stellar populations, through the varying timescales of different nucleosynthetic contributors. Newly measured and compiled [Mg/Fe] ratios in the MILES stellar library are used to confront models of star spectra. Such models have been used in recent years to provide estimates of differential changes in spectral line strengths, due to enhancements in [α/Fe]. In this paper we test one widely used set of theoretical element response functions. Using magnesium as a proxy for all alpha elements we test the reliability of these theoretical response functions against empirical observations, and thus the reliability of current methods of measuring element abundance ratios in the stellar populations.

We present model spectra of stellar populations with variable chemical composition. We derived the [α/Fe] abundance ratio of the stars of the most important libraries (ELODIE, CFLIB and MILES) using full spectrum fitting and we generated PEGASE.HR models resolved in [α/Fe]. We used a semi-empirical approach that combines the observed spectra with synthetic stellar spectra. We tested the models using them to derive [α/Fe] in galaxies and star clusters using full spectrum fitting. The present models are available from http://ulyss.univ-lyon1.fr

We highlight and discuss the importance of accounting for nebular emission in the SEDs of high redshift galaxies, as lines and continuum emission can contribute significantly or subtly to broad-band photometry. Physical parameters such as the galaxy age, mass, star-formation rate, dust attenuation and others inferred from SED fits can be affected to different extent by the treatment of nebular emission.

We analyse a large sample of Lyman break galaxies from z ~ 3–6, and show some main results illustrating e.g. the importance of nebular emission for determinations of the mass–SFR relation, attenuation and age. We suggest that a fairly large scatter in such relations could be intrinsic. We find that the majority of objects (~ 60–70%) is better fit with SEDs accounting for nebular emission; the remaining galaxies are found to show relatively weak or no emission lines. Our modeling, and supporting empirical evidence, suggests the existence of two categories of galaxies, “starbursts” and “post-starbursts” (lower SFR and older galaxies) among the LBG population, and relatively short star-formation timescales.

We present NBursts+phot, a novel technique for the parametric inversion of spectrophotometric data for unresolved stellar populations where high-resolution spectra and broadband SEDs are fitted simultaneously, helping to break the degeneracies between parameters of multi-component stellar population models.

With the goal of assembling a new generation of more realistic single stellar population (SSP) models, we have obtained magnesium abundances for nearly 80% of the stars of the widely employed MILES empirical spectral library. Additional spectroscopic observations of carefully selected stars have recently been obtained to improve the parametric coverage of this library. Here we report on: (i) the framework of Mg abundance determination carried out at mid-resolution, (ii) the newly acquired data, and (iii) the preliminary steps towards modelling stellar populations.

The present work shows the Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs) in the infrared using the IRTF stellar library, obtained using models based on Single Stellar population Models (SSP). We have focused on the K band in order to compare with observables of elliptical galaxies. We also present the comparisons of our models with velocity dispersions, ages and metallicities obtained with models in the optical range.

We have fully characterized the NGSL stellar spectral library, which allows us to open the UV stellar spectral range for stellar population studies. We have performed the necessary steps to prepare this library for its implementation in models synthesizing SEDs of stellar cluster and galaxy spectra. We have determined and homogenized the atmospheric parameters of the stars of this library with the aid of a full spectrum-fitting algorithm, using the MILES spectral library as a template. We also have characterized the resolution of this library and corrected systematic effects in the optical spectral range to achieve a precision of 10% of the dispersion.

Extracting star formation histories from spectra is a process plagued by numerous degeneracies among the parameters that contribute to the definition of the underlying stellar populations. Traditional approaches to overcome such degeneracies involve carefully defined line strength or spectral fitting procedures. However, all these methods rely on comparisons with population synthesis models. This paper illustrates alternative approaches based on the statistical properties of the information that can be extracted from uniformly selected samples of observed spectra, without any prior reference to modelling. Such methods are more useful with large datasets, such as surveys, where the information from thousands of spectra can be exploited to classify galaxies. An illustrative example is presented on the classification of early-type galaxies with optical spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

We present GalMC (Acquaviva et al. 2011), our publicly available Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm for SED fitting, show the results obtained for a stacked sample of Lyman Alpha Emitting galaxies at z ~ 3, and discuss the dependence of the inferred SED parameters on the assumptions made in modeling the stellar populations. We also introduce SpeedyMC, a version of GalMC based on interpolation of pre-computed template libraries. While the flexibility and number of SED fitting parameters is reduced with respect to GalMC, the average running time decreases by a factor of 20,000, enabling SED fitting of each galaxy in about one second on a 2.2GHz MacBook Pro laptop, and making SpeedyMC the ideal instrument to analyze data from large photometric galaxy surveys.

We use a bayesian formalism to quantify the uncertainties in the determination of the luminous mass and age of the dominant stellar population in a galaxy obtained from simple spectral fits. The analysis is performed over a sample of synthetic spectra covering a wide range of star formation histories and seen at different ages and redshifts. Using the bayesian approach we can establish quantitatively the uncertainties in the parameters derived from these fits in a straightforward manner, which is not possible using some simple algorithms, e.g. GASPEX, a non-negative least-square fitting algorithm.

We use the full SED of a well observed dwarf galaxy, I Zw 18, to evaluate what inferences can be made about very high-redshift galaxies from their UV SED's alone.

It has been observed that the ratio of Hα to FUV luminosity (LHα/LFUV) is lower in low surface brightness galaxies. This behaviour has been attributed to systematic variations of the upper mass end and/or the slope of the Initial Mass Function (IMF) Meurer et al. (2009) and Lee et al. (2009)). However these hypotheses do not explain the observed scatter in luminosity ratio (LHα/LFUV). We present a model for the total LHα and LFUV luminosity arising from a randomly populated IMF following the Salpeter power law and the clustering law of Oey & Clarke (2007).

Recent studies show that an old stellar population with high metallicity in the monolithic paradigm can explain the UV upturn. Numerical simulations and empirical studies however point out that massive early-type galaxies have evolved hierarchically with an extended star formation history. This obviously has an impact on our traditional understanding on the UV upturn and requires a new investigation on its origin. We report on our investigation on the evolutionary history of model galaxy SEDs in the hierarchical scenario. The use of conventional population models (calibrated to the monolithic picture) in combination with merger trees and extended star formation fails to reproduce the observed UV upturn. If a hierarchical picture is thought to be more realistic than a monolithic one, new calibration on the population models is required.

The star formation history (SFH) of galaxies is a principle uncertainty in SED modeling, and simple parameterizations of the SFH in typical SED fitting techniques may introduce biases in the resulting derived parameters. It is possible to constrain the SFH of galaxies more tightly through the observations of resolved stellar colour-magnitude diagrams with HST. This work is a first attempt to combine constraints on galaxy SFH from resolved stars with broadband SED modeling from the UV to the IR. This combination allows for the effects of different realistic SFHs on the SED to be quantified.

We present new spectro-photometric NIR observations of 16 post-starburst galaxies especially designed to test for the presence of strong carbon features of thermally pulsing AGB (TP-AGB) stars, as predicted by recent models of stellar population synthesis. Selection based on clear spectroscopic optical features indicating the strong predominance of stellar populations with ages between 0.5 and 1.5 Gyr and redshift around 0.2 allows us to probe the spectral region that is most affected by the carbon features of TP-AGB stars (unaccessible from the ground for z ~ 0 galaxies) in the evolutionary phase when their impact on the IR luminosity is maximum. Nevertheless, none of the observed galaxies display such features. Moreover the NIR fluxes relative to optical are consistent with those predicted by the original Bruzual & Charlot (2003) models, where the impact of TP-AGB stars is much lower than has been recently advocated.

The power of population synthesis as a mean to estimate the star-formation and chemical histories of galaxies has been well established in the last decade. The major developments were due to a huge avalanche of methods, codes and high-quality galaxy data sets, such as the 2dF, 6dF and SDSS surveys. Semi-empirical spectral synthesis allows for the decomposition of a galaxy spectrum in terms of linear combinations of base elements, i.e. Single Stellar Populations (SSPs) of different ages and metallicities, which are computed from evolutionary synthesis codes (BPASS, GALEV, GALAXEV, MILES, PÉGASE, etc. . .), containing distinct ingredients like: stellar library, evolutionary tracks, metallicities and Initial Mass Function. In general, they have solar-scaled relative abundances, but this is about to change with the unfolding of new α-enhanced SSP models (Coelho et al. 2007). However, passive galaxies have some spectral features corresponding to “enhanced-ratios” ([E/Fe]), like O, Ne, Si, S, Mg, Na, C and N over Fe that are not well modeled using solar-scaled SSPs (Trager et al. 2000), leading to residuals between observed and modeled spectra, which also correlate with the velocity dispersion (σ*) and stellar mass (M*): Massive galaxies exhibit a larger [E/Fe] discrepancy than less massive ones. This result can be interpreted as a signature of distinct previous star-formation efficiencies in passive galaxies, leading to distinctive ratios of type Ia and II SNe.

We have applied the starlight spectral synthesis code (Cid Fernandes et al. 2005) to a sample of ~ 1000 passive galaxies from the SDSS DR7 with a S/N at the continuum ≥ 20 to investigate possible enhancements in the derived [E/Fe] ratios. Three sets of SSPs based on Coelho et al. (2007) theoretical models and Walcher et al. (2009) prescriptions were computed for [α/Fe]=0.0, [α/Fe]=0.2 and [α/Fe]=0.4. Our aim is to determine: (1) the quality of the fits, (2) the mean stellar age and metallicity distributions, and (3) the star-formation history of passive galaxies.

Using [α/Fe]=0.0 SSPs, we have identified the strongest residuals in the CN (4142.125-4177.125 Å), Na D (5876.875-5909.375 Å) and Mg (5069.125-5196.625 Å) bands. On the other hand, [α/Fe]=0.2 and [α/Fe]=0.4 SSP models tend to reproduce better the Mg band, as compared to solar-scaled SSPs ([α/Fe]=0.0). The residuals are decreased by 1.77 Å ([α/Fe]=0.2) and 2.92 Å ([α/Fe]=0.4). However, as expected, these α--enhanced models lead to worse fits for the CN and Na D bands. These residuals may even reach up to 2.08 Å (CN) and 4.20 Å (Na D), using [α/Fe]=0.2 SSPs and 2.28 Å (CN) and 7.94 Å (Na D), using [α/Fe]=0.4 SSPs.

In terms of mean stellar ages and metallicities, we obtain non-negligible biases in both quantities when we compare the solar-scaled SSPs with α-enhanced ones, which tend to have mean stellar ages by 0.12 dex ([α/Fe]=0.2) and 0.14 dex ([α/Fe]=0.4) higher and mean stellar metallicities by 0.1 dex ([α/Fe]=0.2) and 0.2 dex ([α/Fe]=0.4) lower.

The stellar line-of-sight velocity distribution (LOSVD) can be strongly asymmetric in regions where the light contributions of both disc and bulge in spiral and lenticular galaxies are comparable. Existing techniques for the stellar kinematics analysis do not take into account the difference of disc and bulge stellar populations. Here we present a novel approach to the analysis of stellar kinematics and stellar populations. We use a two-component model of spectra where different stellar population components are convolved with pure Gaussian LOSVDs. For this model we present Monte-Carlo simulations demonstrating degeneracies between the parameters.

The characteristics of interstellar dust reflect a complex interplay between stellar injection of stardust, destruction in the ISM, and regrowth in clouds. Astronomical observations and analysis of stardust isolated from meteorites have revealed a highly diverse interstellar and circumstellar grain inventory, including both amorphous materials and highly crystalline compounds (silicates and carbon). This review summarizes this dust budget and inventory. Interstellar dust is highly processed during its sojourn from its birthsite (stellar ejecta) to its incorporation into protoplanetary systems. Processing by strong shocks due to supernova explosions is particularly important. Sputtering by impacting gas ions in shocks in the intercloud medium of the ISM is counteracted by accretion in cloud phases and their balance sets the observed, interstellar, elemental depletion patterns. Astronomical and meteoritical-stardust evidence for these processes is reviewed and it is concluded that dust formation in the ISM is very rapid. Not surprisingly, the characteristics of interstellar dust are expected to vary widely reflecting local stellar sources, the effects of SNe processing, and the interstellar accretion process.