Abstract details

The evolution of stellar disks is of great importance for understanding many aspects of galaxy formation. In this work we perform stellar population synthesis on radially resolved photometry of disk galaxies in the SDSS. To explore fully the high dimensional likelihood space defined by the stellar parameters, we use Markov Chain Monte Carlo to quantify the expectation values, the uncertainties and the degeneracies of the parameters. We investigate the agreement between the parameters obtained using the SDSS broad-band colors and the spectra respectively. We discuss the implications of the radial gradients of different physical parameters (e.g. age, metallicity, dust extinction, star formation history) toward constraining formation models of disk galaxies.