A New Empirical Method to Infer the Starburst History of the Universe from Local Galaxy Properties

Understand

The centers of bulges are formed dissipationally via gas inflows over short timescales: the 'starburst' mode of star formation (SF).

• Recent work has shown that detailed observations can be used to separate the stellar mass profile of these 'burst relic' components in local systems.
• Together with the assumption that some Kennicutt-Schmidt law holds, and that the burst was indeed a dissipational gas-rich event, we show that the observed profiles can be inverted to obtain the time and space-dependent SF history of each burst.
• Performing this with a large sample of well-studied spheroids, we show that the implied bursts scale in magnitude, mass, peak SFR, and spatial extent with galaxy mass in simple manner, and provide fits to these correlations.