The SEAGal/STARLIGHT Project

The study of stellar populations in galaxies entered a new era with the availability of large and high quality databases of both observed galactic spectra and state-of-the-art evolutionary synthesis models. In this project we are investigating the power of spectral synthesis as a means to estimate physical properties of galaxies. Spectral synthesis is nothing more than the decomposition of an observed spectrum in terms of a superposition of a base of stellar populations of various ages and metallicities, producing astrophysically interesting output such as the star-formation and chemical enrichment histories of a galaxy, its extinction and velocity dispersion. This is what our STARLIGHT spectral synthesis code does. In this page you will find the code itself, as well a database of its results for over 500k galaxies from the SDSS.

 

Beware: The site has been hacked in May 2018. We’ve tried to restore it, but some links may still be faulty.