Star formation histories of LG dwarf galaxies

DOI

We present uniformly measured star formation histories (SFHs) of 40 Local Group (LG) dwarf galaxies based on color-magnitude diagram (CMD) analysis from archival Hubble Space Telescope imaging. We demonstrate that accurate SFHs can be recovered from CMDs that do not reach the oldest main sequence turn-off (MSTO), but emphasize that the oldest MSTO is critical for precisely constraining the earliest epochs of star formation. We find that: (1) the average lifetime SFHs of dwarf spheroidals (dSphs) can be approximated by an exponentially declining SFH with {tau} ~ 5 Gyr; (2) lower luminosity dSphs are less likely to have extended SFHs than more luminous dSphs; (3) the average SFHs of dwarf irregulars (dIrrs), transition dwarfs, and dwarf ellipticals can be approximated by the combination of an exponentially declining SFH ({tau} ~ 3-4 Gyr) for lookback ages >10-12 Gyr ago and a constant SFH thereafter; (4) the observed fraction of stellar mass formed prior to z = 2 ranges considerably (80% for galaxies with M 10^7^ M_{sun}_) and is largely explained by environment; (5) the distinction between "ultra-faint" and "classical" dSphs is arbitrary; (6) LG dIrrs formed a significantly higher fraction of stellar mass prior to z = 2 than the Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies from Leitner and the SFHs from the abundance matching models of Behroozi et al. This may indicate higher than expected star formation efficiencies at early times in low mass galaxies. Finally, we provide all the SFHs in tabulated electronic format for use by the community.

Cone search capability for table J/ApJ/789/147/table2 (Observational Properties of the WFPC2 Archival Data)

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.17890147
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/789/147
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/789/147
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/789/147
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/789/147
Provenance
Creator Weisz D.R.; Dolphin A.E.; Skillman E.D.; Holtzman J.; Gilbert K.M.,Dalcanton J.J.; Williams B.F.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2017
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Galactic and extragalactic Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics