Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter Galaxies

Friday, 11 September 2026, 16:45   (MW-0250)

From local galaxies to cosmic noon: reconstructing the evolution of stellar populations in galaxy components

Federica Mauro [1], Bodo Ziegler [1]; Iris Breda [1,2]; Polychronis Papaders [2]
1: University of Vienna; 2: Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Universidade do Porto

The spatially resolved study of stellar populations provides a unique window into how galaxies assemble their structural components across cosmic time. Since bulges and disks follow different evolutionary pathways, reconstructing their star formation and mass assembly histories is essential not only for understanding galaxy evolution, but also for predicting how their observed properties change with redshift. In this contribution, I present a study that combines intermediate-redshift and local integral-field spectroscopy to investigate the evolution of galaxy components from the local Universe toward cosmic noon. I first present results for a sample of 34 star-forming galaxies at (z~0.3) from the MAGPI survey observed with MUSE. Using the spectral synthesis codes FADO and STARLIGHT, I derive spatially resolved stellar ages, metallicities, star formation histories, and cumulative mass assembly histories. Radial analyses reveal distinct evolutionary histories for inner and outer galaxy regions, supporting an inside-out growth scenario in which central regions assemble their stellar mass earlier and quench before their surrounding disks. Building on these results, I extend the same stellar population analysis to nearby galaxies from the CALIFA survey, whose spatial resolution enables the separate study of bulges, disks, and bars. The recovered stellar population vectors and mass assembly histories are used as input for forward spectro-photometric modeling, allowing the evolution of galaxy light to be simulated across photometric filters and redshifts (0 < z < 2). These simulations provide a quantitative framework for investigating the effects of chromatic surface brightness modulation (CMOD) on the interpretation of galaxies observed at earlier cosmic epochs. This ongoing work aims to establish a physically motivated connection between resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies and the observable properties of galaxies at intermediate and high redshift, providing new insight into the co-evolution of bulges and disks and into the role of CMOD in studies of galaxy evolution across cosmic time.