2013MNRAS.432.2746G

This is the third paper of a series reporting the results from the popstar evolutionary synthesis models. The main goal of this work is to present and discuss the synthetic photometric properties of single stellar populations resulting from our popstar code. Colours in the Johnson and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) systems, Hα and Hβ luminosities and equivalent widths, and ionizing region size, have been computed for a wide range of metallicity (Z = 0.0001-0.05) and age (0.1Myr to 20 Gyr). We calculate the evolution of the cluster and the region geometry in a consistent manner. We demonstrate the importance of the contribution of emission lines to broader band photometry when characterizing stellar populations, through the presentation of both contaminated and non-contaminated colours (in both the Johnson and SDSS systems). The tabulated colours include stellar and nebular components, in addition to line emission. The main application of these models is the determination of physical properties of a given young ionizing cluster, when only photometric observations are available; for an isolated star-forming region, the young star cluster models can be used, free from the contamination of any underlying background stellar population. In most cases, however, the ionizing population is usually embedded in a large and complex system, and the observed photometric properties result from the combination of a young star-forming burst and the underlying older population of the host. Therefore, the second objective of this paper is to provide a grid of models useful in the interpretation of mixed regions where the separation of young and old populations is not sufficiently reliable. We describe the set of popstar spectral energy distributions (SEDs), and the derived colours for mixed populations where an underlying host population is combined in different mass-ratios with a recent ionizing burst. These colours, together with other common photometric parameters, such as the Hα radius of the ionized region, and Balmer line equivalent widths and luminosities, allow one to infer the physical properties of star-forming regions even in the absence of spectroscopic information.