Gas Infall and Stochastic Star Formation in Local Galaxies
Guinevere Kauffmann
The physical processes that regulate the
rate at which galaxies form stars and the timescale over
which galaxies evolve from star-forming to passive
systems are still not understood.
I discuss how an analysis of the scatter in the colours and
spectral properties of galaxies can be used to constrain
their past star formation histories. I use a sample of
400,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
and new high resolution numerical simulations of
structure formation to construct a simple model for
the rate at which galaxies have been accreting gas and
forming their stars over the past few Gyr.