Lighting up stars in chemical evolution models: the CMD of Sculptor

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to generate synthetic color-magnitude diagrams of galaxies by 'lighting up' stars based on their properties, providing deeper insights into galaxy evolution models beyond chemical abundances.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel approach to produce synthetic CMDs using detailed stellar isochrone grids, improving constraints on chemical evolution models and galaxy formation scenarios.

Findings

Successfully reproduces main features of Sculptor's CMD

Identifies discrepancies at faint magnitudes related to metal-poor populations

Suggests one-zone models may not fully capture metal-poor stellar populations

Abstract

We present a novel approach to draw the synthetic color-magnitude diagram of galaxies, which can provide - in principle - a deeper insight in the interpretation and understanding of current observations. In particular, we `light up' the stars of chemical evolution models, according to their initial mass, metallicity and age, to eventually understand how the assumed underlying galaxy formation and evolution scenario affects the final configuration of the synthetic CMD. In this way, we obtain a new set of observational constraints for chemical evolution models beyond the usual photospheric chemical abundances. The strength of our method resides in the very fine grid of metallicities and ages of the assumed database of stellar isochrones. In this work, we apply our photo-chemical model to reproduce the observed CMD of the Sculptor dSph and find that we can reproduce the main features of the observed CMD. The main discrepancies are found at fainter magnitudes in the main sequence turn-off and sub-giant branch, where the observed CMD extends towards bluer colors than the synthetic one; we suggest that this is a signature of metal-poor stellar populations in the data, which cannot be captured by our assumed one-zone chemical evolution model.