Chemically Consistent Evolutionary Models with Dust

Abstract

As a tool to interpret nearby and high redshift galaxy data from optical to K-band we present our chemically consistent spectrophotometric evolutionary synthesis models. These models take into account the increasing initial metallicity of successive stellar generations using recently published metallicity dependent stellar evolutionary tracks, stellar yields and model atmosphere spectra. The influence of the metallicity is analysed. Dust absorption is included on the basis of gas content and abundance as it varies with time and galaxy type. We compare our models with IUE template spectra and are able to predict UV fluxes for different spectral types. Combined with a cosmological model we obtain evolutionary and k-corrections for various galaxy types and show the differences to models using only solar metallicity input physics as a function of redshift, wavelength band and galaxy type.