Early-Type Galaxy Archeology: Ages, Abundance Ratios, and Effective Temperatures from Full-Spectrum Fitting

Understand

The stellar populations of galaxies hold vital clues to their formation histories.

• In this paper we present results based on modeling stacked spectra of early-type galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) as a function of velocity dispersion, sigma, from 90 km/s to 300 km/s.
• The spectra are of extremely high quality, with typical S/N of 1000/A, and a wavelength coverage of 4000A-8800A.
• Our population synthesis model includes variation in 16 elements from C to Ba, the shift in effective temperature, Delta(Teff), of the stars with respect to a solar metallicity isochrone, amongst other parameters.