Comparing six evolutionary population synthesis models through spectral synthesis on galaxies

Abstract: We compare six popularly used evolutionary population synthesis (EPS) models (BC03, CB07, Ma05, GALEV, GRASIL, Vazdekis/Miles) through fitting the full optical spectra of six representative types of galaxies (star-forming and composite galaxies, Seyfert 2s, LINERs, E+A and early-type galaxies), which are taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Throughout our paper, we use the simple stellar populations (SSPs) from each EPS model and the software STARLIGHT to do our fits. Our main results are: Using different EPS models the resulted numerical values of contributed light fractions change obviously, even though the dominant populations are consistent. The stellar population synthesis does depend on the selection of age and metallicity, while it does not depend on the stellar evolution track much. The importance of young populations decreases from star-forming, composite, Seyfert 2, LINER to early-type galaxies, and E+A galaxies lie between composite galaxies and Seyfert 2s in most cases. We conclude that different EPS models do derive different stellar populations, so that it is not reasonable to directly compare stellar populations estimated from different EPS models. To get reliable results, we should use the same EPS model for the compared samples.