Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jul 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006hst..prop10888c&link_type=abstract
HST Proposal ID #10888. Cycle 15
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy Scl dSph is one of the most luminous of the Milky Way dSph satellites, suffers virtually no foreground confusion or reddening because of its high galactic latitude, and is nearby at 80 kpc from the Sun. It is of great interest to astronomy to understand the detailed histories of dSph galaxies because they may be survivors of the hierarchical merging process that created giant galaxies like our own. Despite this, the age distribution of stars in Scl dSph remains remarkably poorly constrained because of a dearth of high-quality color-magnitude diagrams CMDs of its central regions. Scl dSph is known to be complex on the basis of shallower photometry, radial velocity studies, and investigations of the metallicity; however, the age range of significant star-formation and the proportion of stars older and younger than 10 Gyr is still completely unknown. The age of the centrally concentrated, metal-rich population has never been measured. We propose to obtain deep optical images of the core of Scl dSph with the ACS/WFC in order to measure the temporal evolution of its star-formation rate over its entire lifetime. The ONLY way to reliably measure the variation in star-formation rate on Gyr timescales at ages of 10-13 Gyr is with photometry of a large number of stars at and below the oldest main-sequence turnoffs to magnitudes of B,I = 25.1, 24.5. Because of the high stellar density and resulting image crowding, it is impossible to achieve the required level of photometric precision except with diffraction-limited imaging. These data will permit the first reliable measurement of the star-formation history of the main body of Scl dSph; limited inferences from WFPC2 data in an outer field have been made, but they were hindered not only by small number statistics but by the subsequent revelation of extremely strong population gradients in Scl dSph, such that the stars in the WFPC2 field are not representative of the galaxy as a whole. Our proposed program will shed strong new light on the formation processes of the smallest galaxies. Only by measuring the detailed early histories of galaxies like Scl dSph can we evaluate the impact of outside influences like ram-pressure stripping, tidal stirring, and photoionization feedback on the evolution of small galaxies.
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