The history of star-forming galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Understand

We study the evolution of 82302 star-forming (SF) galaxies from the SDSS.

• Our main goals are to explore new ways of handling star formation histories (SFH) obtained with our publicly available spectral synthesis code STARLIGHT, and apply them to investigate how SFHs vary as a function of nebular metallicity (Zneb).
• Our main results are: (1) A conventional correlation analysis shows how global properties such as luminosity, mass, dust content, mean stellar metallicity and mean stellar age relate to Zneb.
• (2) We present a simple formalism which compresses the results of the synthesis into time-dependent star formation rates (SFR) and mass assembly histories.