Matching the Local and Cosmic Star Formation Histories

TL;DR

This paper compares the star formation histories of local and distant galaxies, updating local data with recent findings and analyzing their consistency over cosmic time.

Contribution

It provides a new comparison of local and cosmic star formation histories, incorporating recent updates and highlighting remaining discrepancies.

Findings

Broad consistency between local and distant SFHs

Identification of excess local SFR in recent epochs

Remaining discrepancies in star formation history data

Abstract

Given the many recent advances in our understanding of the star formation history (SFH) of the Local Group and other nearby galaxies, and in the evolution of star formation with redshift, we present a new comparison of the comoving space density of the star formation rate as a function of look-back time for the Local and Distant Universe. We update the Local SFH derived from the analysis of resolved stellar populations (``fossil records'') in individual nearby galaxies, based on our own estimations as well as available in the literature. While the preliminary comparison of SFHs is found to be broadly consistent, some discrepancies still remain, including an excess of the Local SFR density in the most recent epoch.