Resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies

The lifecycle of star-forming galaxies is very complex: cold gas is turned into stars; the formed stellar populations stir, mix, enrich, heat, and expel the gas via stellar winds, radiation, and supernova explosions; the gas can then fall back onto the galaxy, cool, and form new generations of stars. While we qualitatively understand the involved physical processes governing the gas recycle, we still do not have a clear quantitative description of them.

As a consequence, constraining how galaxies turn their gas into stars, how feedback from these stars disrupts gas and regulates the growth of galaxies, and how these processes have changed with galactic environment across cosmic time, is one of the fundamental problems in modern astrophysics.

This project will address a key part in solving this problem by revealing and studying stellar populations in nearby galaxies. Indeed, nearby galaxies are our best laboratories to study the interplay between stars and gas: they provide the necessary numbers to study star formation across many different environments and, crucially, on the small and resolved scales at which the relevant physics happens.

By combining data from the integral field spectrograph MUSE on the Very Large Telescope with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the stellar population of the nearby galaxy NGC 300 will be studied at unprecedented levels of detail, and directly connected to the star-forming gas reservoir in the galaxy. Once in place, the developed analysis methods can then be applied to other nearby galaxies (observed e.g. with the SITELLE instrument on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope), therefore providing a framework to quantify the galactic lifecycle of gas and stars.