Place: Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Enormous progress has been made in the last two decades both in the
detailed study of nearby resolved stellar populations and in the
discovery and characterization of high redshift galaxies. The 2010 May
Symposium aims at understanding the physical processes and observational
characteristics of local stellar populations as a tool for elucidating
the evolution of general stellar populations throughout cosmic history.
In the Galactic neighborhood, resolved imaging and spectroscopic studies
of star clusters and galaxies provide a means to measure the kinematics,
chemical abundances, and ages of individual stars. For such systems,
high resolution N-body simulations can now track the dynamical motions
of millions of stars over the lifetime of the oldest systems, and
updated stellar models can shed light on their internal evolution. The
interplay of these observations and theory form a critical input to our
interpretation of the formation processes and subsequence stellar and
dynamical evolution of nearby stellar populations.
The knowledge that we gain from studying nearby resolved stellar
populations directly feeds our ability to measure the properties of
distant galaxies. The morphology of these systems is tied to their past
accretion and merger histories and subsequent tidal disruption and
dynamical evolution, processes that we clearly see occurring today in
nearby galaxies such as the Milky Way and M31. The observed light in the
different structural components of these galaxies is dominated by the
distribution of individual stars in post main-sequence evolutionary
phases, and is therefore linked to our understanding of stellar
evolution beyond the main-sequence turnoff. The interplay of these
dynamical and stellar evolution effects with global influences from the
initial mass function, star formation laws, and nucleosynthesis and
feedback relations, shapes our current view of galaxies.
In the 2010 May Symposium, we will bridge these two very different
astrophysical regimes in an effort to enhance our interpretation of the
properties of stellar populations over cosmic time. The structure of the
symposium will involve first presenting observational and theoretical
views on triggering processes that lead to the formation of stellar
populations, followed by a discussion of their subsequent stellar,
chemical, and dynamical evolution. This includes investigating the
impact of feedback processes on future generations of stars, both from
massive stars in systems such as 30 Doradus and from lower mass stars as
inferred from the observation of multiple sequences in nearby star
clusters. The link between star clusters and galaxies, and their role as
building blocks of more massive systems will also be discussed. Our
knowledge from these nearby resolved studies will guide what we can
confidently say about galaxy properties across cosmic time, including
new observations ranging from systems at intermediate redshifts when the
cosmic star formation rate is peaking to even earlier epochs.
