• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.29 no.spc1
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• pp.49-51
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• 1996

New population synthesis models, with the effects of metallicity spread and the horizontal-branch (HB) morphology, provide a way to break the well-known age-metallicity degeneracy in the analysis of the integrated light of elliptical galaxies. Our models suggest that the far- UV radiation of these systems is dominated by a minority population of metal-poor, hot HB stars and their post-HB progeny, while the optical radiation is dominated by a metal-rich population. The systematic variation of UV upturn depends on the contribution from metal-poor, hot HB stars and their post-HB progeny, which in turn depends on the ages of old stellar populations in galaxies. Our result implies a prolonged epoch of galaxy formation, in the sense that more massive galaxies (in denser environments) formed first. Our models also suggest that the strenghth of H$\beta$ index is strongly affected by HB stars, and hence previous age estimation without detailed modeling of the HB would underestimate the ages of ellipticals by $\~$7 Gyr.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.75.2-75.2
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• 2019

This poster introduces the ongoing "Narrow-band Ca Photometry for Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies" project and presents the latest results. The project aims to explain the formation and evolution of dwarf spheroidal galaxies by examining the structural properties of stellar populations as a function of metallicity. To overcome the lack of stars with known spectroscopic metallicities for dwarf spheroidal galaxies, we apply the hk index as a photometric metallicity indicator to three galaxies-Draco, Sextans, and Canes Venatici I. For all three galaxies, we found that metal-poor and metal-rich groups of red-giant-branch stars have distinct spatial distributions, in which metal-rich stars are centrally concentrated while metal-poor stars are relatively dispersed. In Sextans, we found an off-centered peak of metal-poor stars which is presumed to be a disrupting star cluster in this galaxy. We will discuss the implications of our results for the dwarf galaxy formation and possible directions on future work of this project.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.189-212
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• 2003

I review the current status of understanding when, how long, and how giant elliptical galaxies formed, focusing on the globular clusters. Several observational evidences show that massive elliptical galaxies formed at z > 2 (> 10 Gyr ago). Giant elliptical galaxies show mostly a bimodal color distribution of globular clusters, indicating a factor of $\approx$ 20 metallicity difference between the two peaks. The red globular clusters (RGCs) are closely related with the stellar halo in color and spatial distribution, while the blue globular clusters (BGCs) are not. The ratio of the number of the RGCs and that of the BGCs varies depending on galaxies. It is concluded that the BGCs might have formed 12-13 Gyr ago, while the RGCs and giant elliptical galaxies might have formed similarly 10-11 Gyr ago. It remains now to explain the existence of a gap between the RGC formation epoch and the BGC formation epoch, and the rapid metallicity increase during the gap (${\Delta}t{\approx}$ 2 Gyr). If hierarchical merging can form a significant number of giant elliptical galaxies > 10 Gyr ago, several observational constraints from stars and globular clusters in elliptical galaxies can be explained.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.209-221
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• 2017

We investigate the star formation rate, stellar mass, and gas-phase metallicity of local starburst galaxies with different star formation time scales based on their optical spectra. The observation is made using the longslit spectrograph attached to the 4K CCD on the Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory 1.8m telescope, targeting 21 Wolf-Rayet galaxies as young starbursts and 13 UV excess galaxies as slightly older starbursts. A Baldwin-Phillips-Terlevich diagram analysis shows that 50% of the observed targets are pure star-forming galaxies while only 15% are classified as Active Galactic Nuclei. Fraction of galaxies that reside in composite region is higher in UV excess galaxies than in Wolf-Rayet galaxies, suggesting that the AGN development requires extra time after the onset of the star formation. Most of the observed starburst galaxies have stellar masses of $10^{9-11}M_{\odot}$ and stellar formation rates of $0.01-100M_{\odot}yr^{-1}$, and their star formation rates are consistent with that of the SDSS star forming main sequence galaxies of similar stellar mass. There is no significant difference between Wolf-Rayet galaxies and UV excess galaxies in terms of the stellar mass and star formation rate. We also see a mass-metallicity relation for local starbursts with slightly lower metallicity for a given stellar mass, which implies the existence of a strong feedback activity due to the star formation in these galaxies.

• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.489-490
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• 2015

We present population synthesis models for the calcium II triplet (CaT), currently the most popular metallicity indicator, based on high-resolution empirical spectral energy distributions (SEDs). Our new CaT models, based on empirical SEDs, show a linear correlation below [Fe/H] ~ -0.5, but the linear relation breaks down in the metal-rich regime by converging to the same equivalent width. This relation shows good agreement with the observed CaT of globular clusters (GCs) in NGC 1407 and the Milky Way. However, a model based on theoretical SEDs does not show this feature of the CaT and fails to reproduce observed GCs in the metal-rich regime. This linear relation may cause inaccurate metallicity determination for metal-rich stellar populations. We have also confirmed that the effect of horizontal-branch stars on the CaT is almost negligible in models based on both empirical and theoretical SEDs. Our new empirical model may explain the difference between the color distributions and CaT distributions of GCs in various early-type galaxies. Based on our model, we claim that the CaT is not a good metallicity indicator for simple stellar populations in the metal-rich regime.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.73.2-73.2
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• 2019

The physical origin of low escape fractions of ionizing radiation derived from Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) at z ~ 3 - 4 is a puzzle in the theory of reionization. We perform idealized disk galaxy simulations to investigate how galactic properties, such as metallicity and gas mass, affect the escape of Lyman continuum (LyC) photons using radiation-hydrodynamic code RAMSES-RT, with strong stellar feedback. We find that the luminosity-weighted escape fraction from a metal-poor (Z=0.002) galaxy embedded in a halo of mass M_h ~ 10¹¹ M_⊙ is 〈f^3D_esc〉 ~ 8%. However, when the gas metallicity is increased to Z=0.02, the escape fraction is significantly reduced to 〈f^3D_esc〉 ~ 1%, as young stars are enshrouded by their birth clouds for a longer period of time. On the other hand, increasing the gas mass by a factor of 5 leads to 〈f^3D_esc〉 ~ 4%, as LyC photons are only moderately absorbed by the thicker disk. Our experiments seem to suggest that high metallicity is primarily responsible for the low escape fractions observed from LBGs, supporting the scenario in which the escape fraction has a negative correlation with halo mass. Indeed, our simulated galaxy with the typical metallicity of LBGs (Z=0.006) shows the relative escape fraction of 8%, consistent with recent observations of galaxies with M₁₅₀₀ = -20.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.54.3-55
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• 2018

We present the physical and environmental properties of nearby dwarf elliptical-like galaxies. The present sample consists of ~ 1,100 dwarf elliptical-like galaxies within redshifts 0.01. The morphological types of the present study were determined by Ann, Seo, and Ha (2015) who classified the dwarf elliptical-like galaxies by the five subtypes of dS0, dE, dSph, dEbc, and dEblue. We examine their star formation history using STARLIGHT. The star formation history of dwarf elliptical-like galaxies depends on their subtypes. The luminosities of dS0, dE, and dSph galaxies are dominated by the extremely old stars (${\geq}10^{10}yr$) with $z{\approx}0.0004$ while those of dEbc and dEblue galaxies are mainly due to the young (${\sim}10^7yr$) stars together with the nearly equal contribution by extremely young stars (${\sim}10^6yr$) and old (${\sim}10^9yr$) stars. Young populations have a variety of metallicity, from z=0.0001 to z = 0.04, while old populations have metallicity of z = 0.0001 and z = 0.0004. While the formation history of stars older than ~1010yr depends mainly on the luminosity of galaxies, the formation history of stars younger than ~108yr is mainly affected by their environment. However, luminosity and environment are equally important for the star formation history if there is no star formation at the early phase of galaxy formation.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.49.3-50
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• 2017

Metallicity is one of the most important properties in understanding galaxy evolution. However, measuring metallicity is limited to low redshift (z<3.5) due to the faintness of the metallicity indicators in normal galaxies. For high redshift universe, active galactic nuclei (AGN) can be used to constrain the host galaxy metallicity. Previous studies investigated AGN metallicity using emission line flux ratios (i.e., NV/CIV and FeII/MgII), finding no evolution up to z~6. Those results might be due to selection effect since previous studies are based on very luminous AGNs. The observed luminosity-metallicity relation of AGNs (e.g., Nagao et al. 2006) suggests that luminous AGNs may be already matured at the observed epoch. Considering the luminosity-metallicty relation, we focused on low luminosity AGNs to find young AGNs (i.e., low metallicity). Through the Gemini/GNIRS observation in 2012A and 2015A (K-GMT GN-2015A-Q-203 PI: Shin, J.), we obtained the Gemini/GNIRS data for 7 high redshift AGNs (3.0

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.77.3-77.3
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• 2019

We present an analysis of the stellar population of compact elliptical galaxies (cEs) in various environments. Following conventional selection criteria of cEs, we created a list of cE candidates in the redshift range of z < 0.05 using SDSS DR12 catalog. We finally selected cEs with low-luminosity (Mg > 18.7 mag), small effective radius (Re < 600 pc), and high velocity dispersion (> 60 kms-1). We divide our cE sample into those inside and outside of the one virial radius of the bright (Mr < -21 mag) nearby host galaxy which is then defined as cEs with (cEw) and without (cEw/o) host galaxy, respectively. We investigated the stellar population properties of cEs based on the Hb, Mgb, Fe 5270, and Fe 5335 line strengths from the OSSY catalog. We found that cEw has a systematically higher metallicity than cEw/o. In the velocity dispersion-Mgb distribution, while cEw/o follows the relation of early-type galaxies, cEw are found to have a systematically higher metallicity than cEw/o at a given velocity dispersion. The different feature in the metallicity between cEw and cEw/o can suggest that two different scenarios can be provided in the formation of cEs. cEw would be the remnant cores of the massive progenitor galaxies that their outer parts have been tidally stripped by massive neighbor galaxies (i.e., nurture origin). On the other hand, cEw/o are likely to be faint-end of early-type galaxies maintaining in-situ evolution (i.e., nurture origin).

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.33.2-33.2
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• 2015

The color distribution functions (CDFs) of globular clusters (GCs) in individual early-type galaxies show great diversity in their morphology. Based on the conventional "linear" relationship between colors and metallicities of GCs, the inferred GC metallicity distribution functions and thus their formation histories should be as diverse as they appear. In contrast, an alternative scenario rooted in the "nonlinear" nature of the color-to-metallicity transformation finds the various CDFs pointing systematically to a simple picture, i.e., such a high degree of variety stems predominately from only one parameter, the mean metallicity of GCs. The simulated CDFs of GCs aimed to reproduce 67 massive early-type galaxies from the ACS Virgo & Fornax Cluster Survey show that over 70% of the CDFs concur fully with the nonlinearity scenario. We discuss our new findings in terms of early-type galaxy formation in the cluster environment.