Reconstructing the Star Formation History of the Galaxy

Abstract

The evolution of the star formation rate in the Galaxy is one of the key ingredients quantifying the formation and determining the chemical and luminosity evolution of galaxies. Many complementary methods exist to infer the star formation history of the components of the Galaxy, from indirect methods for analysis of low-precision data, to new exact analytic methods for analysis of sufficiently high quality data. We summarise available general constraints on star formation histories, showing that derived star formation rates are in general comparable to those seen today. We then show how colour-magnitude diagrams of volume- and absolute magnitude-limited samples of the solar neighbourhood observed by Hipparcos may be analysed, using variational calculus techniques, to reconstruct the local star formation history. The remarkable accuracy of the data coupled to our maximum-likelihood variational method allows objective quantification of the local star formation history with a time resolution of ~ 50 Myr. Over the past 3Gyr, the solar neighbourhood star formation rate has varied by a factor of ~ 4, with characteristic timescale about 0.5Gyr, possibly triggered by interactions with spiral arms.