Measuring Ages and Elemental Abundances from Unresolved Stellar Populations: Fe, Mg, C, N, and Ca
Abstract
We present a method for determining mean light-weighted ages and abundances of Fe, Mg, C, N, and Ca, from medium resolution spectroscopy of unresolved stellar populations. The method, pioneered by Schiavon (2007), is implemented in a publicly available code called EZAges. The method and error estimation are described, and the results tested for accuracy and consistency, by application to integrated spectra of well-known Galactic globular and open clusters. Ages and abundances from integrated light analysis agree with studies of resolved stars to within +/-0.1 dex for most clusters, and to within +/-0.2 dex for nearly all cases. The results are robust to the choice of Lick indices used in the fitting to within +/-0.1 dex, except for a few systematic deviations which are clearly categorized. The realism of our error estimates is checked through comparison with detailed Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, we apply EZAges to the sample of galaxies presented in Thomas et al. (2005) and compare our derived values of age, [Fe/H], and [alpha/Fe] to their analysis. We find that [alpha/Fe] is very consistent between the two analyses, that ages are consistent for old (Age > 10 Gyr) populations, but show modest systematic differences at younger ages, and that [Fe/H] is fairly consistent, with small systematic differences related to the age systematics. Overall, EZAges provides accurate estimates of fundamental parameters from medium resolution spectra of unresolved stellar populations in the old and intermediate-age regime, for the first time allowing quantitative estimates of the abundances of C, N, and Ca in these unresolved systems. The EZAges code can be downloaded at http://www.ucolick.org/~graves/EZAges.html