Semi-empirical Models of Galaxy Formation and Evolution

TL;DR

This review discusses semi-empirical models of galaxy formation, comparing their types, highlighting recent hybrid approaches, and exploring future developments in the field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of SEMs, including a detailed analysis of a recent hybrid model and insights into their advantages and limitations.

Findings

Hybrid SEMs offer flexible modeling options.

Recent developments improve interpretative capabilities.

Future prospects include integrating more observational data.

Abstract

We provide a review on semi-empirical models of galaxy formation and evolution. We present a brief census of the three main modeling approaches to galaxy evolution, namely hydrodynamical simulations, semi-analytic models, and semi-empirical models (SEMs). We focus on SEMs in their different flavors, i.e. interpretative, descriptive and hybrid, discussing the peculiarities and highlighting virtues and shortcomings for each of these variants. We dissect a simple and recent hybrid SEM from our team to highlight some technical aspects. We offer some outlook on the prospective developments of SEMs. Finally, we provide a short summary of this review.