Objectives

MAGPop is a Marie Curie Research Training Network funded under the Sixth Framework Programme of the EU. The network will run from 1 December 2004 to 1 December 2008. Its objectives are to extract key physical information - stellar masses, star formation rates, star formation histories, metallicities, dust content and the incidence of accretion onto central supermassive black holes - from the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies in the local Universe and at high redshifts. The objectives of the network are to use a wide range of multiwavelength survey data to quantify empirically how the stars in galaxies were formed, how the heavy elements in galaxies were produced and how supermassive black holes were assembled over the history of the Universe. This knowledge will be used to constrain theoretical models of galaxy formation.

Approach and Methodology

The accomplishment of this goal requires the combined expertise of three different (and historically separate) communities working in extragalactic astronomy:

• Observational astronomers with expertise in the construction and analysis of large galaxy surveys at different wavelengths.
• Experts in stellar population synthesis, in photo-ionization codes for computing the nebular emission from galaxies, and in models for the effect of dust on galactic SEDs.
• Theoreticians with expertise in modelling galaxy formation in its proper cosmological context. This network will bring together these three communities to work on the interpretation of the physical properties of galaxies deduced from their SEDs. It will serve as a training ground for a new generation of young researchers, who will gain a broad insight into the problem of galaxy formation, both in the analysis of state-of-the-art observational data and in its theoretical interpretation.

Key Projects

The joint programme of work of the MAGPOP network is divided into 6 key work packages. The main goals of these work packages are:

• to derive stellar masses, star formation rates, metallicities and star formation histories for 105 galaxies with high-quality spectra in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and to explore how the interplay of environment, mass and structure has in uenced galaxy evolution.
• to use combined ultra-violet/optical/infrared data for thousands of galaxies with redshifts from 0 to 2 to study how star formation has evolved over cosmological timescales.
• to build new high resolution stellar population synthesis models and to constrain the star formation histories and the metallicities of local elliptical galaxies.
• to derive photometric redshifts, luminosities and spectral types for 106 galaxies with 5- band photometry in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and to study the clustering properties of star-forming galaxies at high redshifts.
• to build state-of-the-art stellar population synthesis models with dust reprocessing and to explore the connection between the starburst and the active galactic nucleus in infraredluminous galaxies.
• to study the evolution of galaxies to high redshifts in di erent environments, and to use spatially resolved spectroscopy to understand this evolution in more detail.