18 février 2020Star formation from a photometric end point

After 4 years, The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program is complete. PHAT can now offer the ability to view the stars and the ISM together in M31, which is essential to understand the complex processes of star formation and galaxy evolution. I will first briefly present the unprecedented complexity of this HST photometric campaign that mapped continuously 1/3 of M31’s disk at the high angular resolution from Ultraviolet to near-Infrared and I will highlight some of the key results of the PHAT program. I will further focus on star formation and the in particular use of star clusters in M31 as tracers of formation events. I will discuss cluster formation and destruction efficiencies, and the environmentally-dependent aspects of star formation.