What can distant galaxies teach us about massive stars?

Abstract

Observations of star-forming galaxies in the distant Universe (z > 2) are starting to confirm the importance of massive stars in shaping galaxy emission and evolution. Inevitably, these distant stellar populations are unresolved, and the limited data available must be interpreted in the context of stellar population synthesis models. With the imminent launch of JWST and the prospect of spectral observations of galaxies within a gigayear of the Big Bang, the uncertainties in modelling of massive stars are becoming increasingly important to our interpretation of the high redshift Universe. In turn, these observations of distant stellar populations will provide ever stronger tests against which to gauge the success of, and flaws in, current massive star models.

8 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of IAU Symposium 329: "The Lives and Death Throws of Massive Stars"

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• Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis Version 2.1: construction, observational verification and new results
• Simulating galaxies in the reionization era with FIRE-2: galaxy scaling relations, stellar mass functions, and luminosity functions
• The impact of chemistry on the structure of high-z galaxies
• The nature of luminous Lyman-alpha emitters at z~2-3: maximal dust-poor starbursts and highly ionising AGN
• GAME: GAlaxy Machine learning for Emission lines