We examine the star forming phenomenon as it can be encountered in galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which possibly contains the largest homogeneous sample of star forming galaxy spectra to date.

After eliminating all spectra with an insufficient signal-to-noise ratio, without strong emission lines, and without the [OII] λ3727 Å line, which is necessary for the determination of the gas metallicity (which excludes galaxies with redshift ≲ 0.024–0.025), our sample contains ~6000 spectra of star forming galaxies.

Through a detailed stellar population analysis employing evolutionary synthesis methods we determined the stellar composition of these galaxies, that is, the masses, ages and metallicities of their partial stellar populations.

We find that most, possibly all, galaxies of our sample contain, apart from the presently bursting, ionising young generation (≤ 107 yrs), old (≥ 109 yrs) and intermediate (between 107 and 109 yrs) populations, whereas the old population dominates the stellar mass (but not the light).

We also find that high (stellar) mass galaxies have higher gas metallicities and lower present star formation rates relative to their total (stellar) masses, than low mass galaxies, indicating a higher chemical evolution degree for high mass galaxies.

Furthermore, we find that gas enrichment mechanisms in star forming galaxies do not vary with galactic mass, being the same for low- and high-mass galaxies on average. Gas enrichment mechanisms seem to present a greater variety at the high-mass end, though, indicating a more complex assembly history for high-mass galaxies.

HERMES is a new, multi-object high resolution spectrometer for the 3.9m Anglo Australian Telescope, using the existing 2dF positioner. The primary goal of the HERMES survey is to unravel the history of the Galaxy from detailed elemental abundances for about 1.2 million individual stars. The HERMES chemical tagging survey concentrates on the 5000 to 8000 Å window at a resolving power of 30,000 in order to identify dissolved star formation aggregates and ascertain the importance of mergers throughout the history of the Galaxy.

We study the interplay between stellar population of the Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCG) and cluster global properties. We use X-ray properties from Chandra, ROSAT and ASCA observations and BCGs spectra from SDSS-DR6. Using STARLIGHT we determined the star formation history of the BCGs and look for relations with the intra-cluster gas properties. Our first results show no correlation between the recent star formation with x-ray temperature and dynamic state. An important star formation is happening in cool-core Cluster. This new stellar population has low metallicity, pointing to an external source of cold gas to form stars.

Using the Hyperz code (Bolzonella et al. 2000) we present photometric redshift estimates for a random sample of galaxies selected from the SDSS/DR7 and GALEX/DR4, for which spectroscopic redshifts are also available.

We confirm that the inclusion of ultraviolet photometry improves the accuracy of photo-zs for those galaxies with g* – r* ≤ 0.7 and zspec ≤ 0.2. We also address the problem of how binary interactions can affect photo-z estimates, and find that their effect is negligible.

Including MIPS 24 μm dust emission in the multi-band stellar population analysis, we roughly constrain the star formation histories (SFHs) of MIPS 24 μm selected star-forming regions across the merging disks of the Antennae galaxies. While the overlap regions hold the highest ratios of young over intermediate populations, the western-loop regions have the highest ratios of intermediate to old populations. We find two sequential star formation (SF) paths in the overlap regions, which we interpret as the imprint of the interpenetrating process of the two merging disks following their second close encounter.