Abstract details

We try to find some colors that have the potential to study stellar age and metallicity from $UBVRIJHK$ and $ugriz$ colors of the population synthesis model of Bruzual \& Charlot (2003) (BC03). The principal component analysis (PCA) and relative sensitive parameter techniques are used in this work. We find that $U-K$, $U-H$, $U-J$, $B-K$, $B-H$, $U-I$, $B-J$ and $V-K$ are more important to determine stellar age and metallicity than other colors, which is independent of the resolution of the population synthesis model and can be used to supervise the multi-color methods of the determination of stellar populations. However, models with different resolutions show very different potential colors for solving the age and metallicity degenerate problem: The results show that $U-K$ and $R-I$ are more advantageous to study stellar age and metallicity via the low-resolution model of BC03, while they are replaced by $B-K$ and $B-V$ when using the high-resolution model. Besides, $u-g$ and $r-i$ seem to have the potential to separate stellar age from metallicity for the low-resolution model of BC03 but there is no such $ugriz$ colors for the high-resolution model.