A New Tool for Studying Galaxies

RemoveYoung is a tool that was recently developed by two astronomers called Polychronis Papaderos while working at the Instituto de Astrotisica e Ciencias do Espaco. It has been created to overlook or suppress the luminosity contributed by young stars from images of galaxy. The co-leader of SELGIFS work package and Star Formation History Reconstruction says that, “RemoveYoung can become an important tool in extragalactic astronomy. We have now a means to unveil the underlying old stellar populations of galaxies that were hidden by luminous massive stars.”

The optical appearance of galaxies is a consequence of their evolutionary history. However, the assembling histories of these galaxies gets imprinted over their present time morphology is one of the most attractive points of this research. Mostly, the morphologies of star forming galaxies gets dominated by huge luminous young stars that can easily overshadow the significant structural features of the previous stellar backgrounds. These restrict the insights inside the galaxy formation process quite strongly. With the help of this tool, researchers will be able to remove the stellar populations younger than a respective defined age numerically. This also allows the calculation of surface brightness, spectral energy, as well as their surface density distribution of previous stellar populations.

The founding member as well as the co-researcher of SELGIFS, Polychronis Papaderos, says, that, “RemoveYoung exploits the combined power of population spectral synthesis and integral field spectroscopy to unravel the assembly history of galaxies.” A technique like this has multiple applications with respect to star-forming galaxies. For example, it can easily uncover the tidal tails that witnessed past galaxy mergers and fusions, near and far located lower mass starburst galaxies, and so forth.