2000/03/28 by U. Fritze–v. Alvensleben, U. Fritze-v. Alvensleben, Alvensleben, U. Fritze-v.
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0003416
22 pages, 4 figs, Highlight Talk to appear in {\sl New Astrophysical Horizons}, Rev. Mod. Astron. {\bf 13}
arxiv created 2000/03/28 · openalex publication_date 2000/03/28 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
I discuss the chemical and spectrophotometric evolution of galaxies over cosmological timescales and present a first attempt to treat both aspects in a chemically consistent way. In our evolutionary synthesis approach, we account for the increasing metallicity of successive generations of stars and use sets of stellar evolutionary tracks, stellar yields, spectra, etc. for various metallicities. This gives a more realistic description of nearby galaxies, which are observed to have broad stellar metalllicty distributions, as well as of young galaxies at high redshift. Selected results are presented for the chemo-cosmological evolution of galaxies as compared to QSO absorption line observations and for the spectrophotometric evolution of galaxies to very high redshifts. On cosmological timescales, intercations are important drivers of galaxy evolution. Neglecting dynamical aspects we study the effects of interaction-induced starbursts on the spectrophotometric and chemical evolution of galaxies and briefly discuss the formation of star clusters and Tidal Dwarf Galaxies in this context.