Chemical evolution of galaxies: past, present and future

Abstract

In this paper I will describe the basic principles of chemical evolution of galaxies, its main ingredients and uncertainties. By means of chemical evolution we can perform the so-called galactic archaeology, which consists in reconstructing the history of star formation of galaxies and in particular of the Milky Way, starting from the observed stellar and gas abundances. Galactic archaeology is a powerful tool to predict also the behavior of galaxies at high redshift. In particular, we adopt the “time-delay model” which is a way of interpreting the [X/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] relations (X is the abundance of a specific chemical element) in terms of different timescales of the stellar progenitors of the chemical elements relative to Fe, which is the indicator of “metallicity”. I will then describe how we can reconstruct the star formation histories of galaxies of different morphological type (spirals, ellipticals) starting from the available observations. Particular attention will be paid to the study of the Milky Way which is the best studied galaxy at the moment. I will start describing the first chemical evolution models and then the most recent ones, the main difference between the old and new models being the observational data to compare with. Finally, I will foresee which could be the future improvements to chemical models and what constraints can we derive to better understand galaxy evolution.