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Spectral and Photometric Evolution of Young Stellar Populations: the Impact of Gaseous Emission at Various Metallicities

We include gaseous continuum and line emission into our GALEV models for the spectral and photometric evolution of Simple Stellar Populations (SSPs) for various metallicities in the range 0.02 <= Z/Zsun <= 2.5. This allows to extend them to significantly younger ages than before. They now cover the age range from 4 Myr all through 14 Gyr. We point out the very important contributions of gaseous emission to broad band fluxes and their strong metallicity dependence during very early evolutionary stages of star clusters, galaxies or subgalactic fragments with vigorous ongoing star formation. Emission-line contributions are commonly seen in these actively star-forming regions. Models without gaseous emission cannot explain their observed colors at all, or lead to wrong age estimates. We use up-to-date Lyman continuum emission rates and decided to use recent empirical determinations of emission line ratios relative to Hbeta for subsolar metallicities. We justify this approach for all situations where no or not enough spectral information is available to determine all the parameters required by photoionization models. The effects of gaseous line and continuum emission on broad band fluxes are shown for different metallicities and as a function of age. In addition to the many filter systems already included in our earlier models, we here also include the HST NICMOS and Advanced Camera for Surveys (= ACS) filter systems.