Population gradients in nearby dwarf galaxies

Abstract

Recent results on the detection of substructure in dwarf spheroidal galaxies are discussed. In most cases they show that, when a galaxy experiences multiple SF episodes, the intermediate age population is more centrally concentrated than the old population, and that the recent SF is even more concentrated towards the central regions. Moreover, it appears that the spatial distribution of stars becomes more and more irregular as younger and younger subpopulations are considered. We illustrate how wide-area observations, allowing a substantial coverage of dwarf spheroidals (in particular the satellites of the Milky Way), has provided evidence for cosmologically old populations in every dSph galaxy. All these results are placed in the broader scenario of population gradients in nearby dwarf galaxies of different morphological types.