Resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies

恒星形成星系的生命周期非常复杂：冷气体转化为恒星；形成的恒星群通过恒星风、辐射和超新星爆炸来搅拌、混合、浓缩、加热和排出气体；然后气体可以落回星系，冷却，形成新一代的恒星。虽然我们定性地了解了支配气体循环的复杂的物理过程，但我们仍然没有对它们进行明确的定量描述。因此，限制星系如何将其气体转化为恒星，这些恒星的反馈如何扰乱气体并调节星系的生长，以及这些过程如何在宇宙时间内随星系环境发生变化，是现代天体物理学的基本问题之一。这个项目将通过揭示和研究附近星系中的恒星数量来解决解决这个问题的关键部分。事实上，附近的星系是我们研究恒星和气体相互作用的最佳实验室：它们提供了必要的数据来研究恒星在许多不同环境中的形成，关键是，在相关物理发生的小而可分辨的尺度上。通过结合来自甚大望远镜上的积分场光谱仪缪斯的数据和哈勃太空望远镜的数据，附近星系NGC 300的恒星数量将被以前所未有的详细程度进行研究，并与星系中形成恒星的气藏直接相连。一旦到位，开发的分析方法就可以应用于附近的其他星系(例如，利用加拿大-法国-夏威夷望远镜上的SITELLE仪器进行观测)，从而提供了一个量化气体和恒星的星系生命周期的框架。

The lifecycle of star-forming galaxies is very complex: cold gas is turned into stars; the formed stellar populations stir, mix, enrich, heat, and expel the gas via stellar winds, radiation, and supernova explosions; the gas can then fall back onto the galaxy, cool, and form new generations of stars. While we qualitatively understand the involved physical processes governing the gas recycle, we still do not have a clear quantitative description of them. As a consequence, constraining how galaxies turn their gas into stars, how feedback from these stars disrupts gas and regulates the growth of galaxies, and how these processes have changed with galactic environment across cosmic time, is one of the fundamental problems in modern astrophysics.This project will address a key part in solving this problem by revealing and studying stellar populations in nearby galaxies. Indeed, nearby galaxies are our best laboratories to study the interplay between stars and gas: they provide the necessary numbers to study star formation across many different environments and, crucially, on the small and resolved scales at which the relevant physics happens.By combining data from the integral field spectrograph MUSE on the Very Large Telescope with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the stellar population of the nearby galaxy NGC 300 will be studied at unprecedented levels of detail, and directly connected to the star-forming gas reservoir in the galaxy. Once in place, the developed analysis methods can then be applied to other nearby galaxies (observed e.g. with the SITELLE instrument on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope), therefore providing a framework to quantify the galactic lifecycle of gas and stars.