ON THE INCORPORATION OF METALLICITY DATA INTO MEASUREMENTS OF STAR FORMATION HISTORY FROM RESOLVED STELLAR POPULATIONS

The combination of spectroscopic stellar metallicities and resolved star color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) has the potential to constrain the entire star formation history (SFH) of a galaxy better than fitting CMDs alone (as is most common in SFH studies using resolved stellar populations). In this paper, two approaches to incorporating external metallicity information into CMD-fitting techniques are presented. Overall, the joint fitting of metallicity and CMD information can increase the precision of measured age-metallicity relationships (AMRs) and star formation rates by 10% over CMD fitting alone. However, systematics in stellar isochrones and mismatches between spectroscopic and photometric determinations of metallicity can reduce the accuracy of the recovered SFHs. I present a simple mitigation of these systematics that can reduce their amplitude to the level obtained from CMD fitting alone, while ensuring that the AMR is consistent with spectroscopic metallicities. As is the case in CMD-fitting analysis, improved stellar models and calibrations between spectroscopic and photometric metallicities are currently the primary impediment to gains in SFH precision from jointly fitting stellar metallicities and CMDs.