The Demographics of Starburst Galaxies

摘要

With the advent of an explosion of new data on star formation rates in galaxies from SDSS, 2DF, GALEX, Spitzer, HST, and an armada of new H imaging surveys, we are in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of starbursts and their host galaxies. As an introduction to this volume we begin with a brief review of the history of this subject and the recent extraordinary growth in observations of starburst galaxies and star-forming galaxies in general. We then use data from a few recent H surveys to illustrate how large and complete datasets on star formation rates can be used to explore the demographics of star-forming galaxies and the contribution of starbursts to the cosmic star formation budget.