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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2016
Dwarf galaxies may play a key role in the formation and evolution of bigger systems. This makes knowing how they form and evolve and, in particular, how their star formation histories (SFHs) have proceeded since their birth, a topic of major interest. For nearby galaxies, the color-magnitude diagram (CMD) contains stars formed over all their lifetime. It is hence a fossil record of their SFHs. The analysis with synthetic CMDs provides a powerful tool to retrieve them.
In this paper, I discuss the critical issues related to the computation of synthetic CMDs, present a short summary of the currently available results for the SFH extending the full life of galaxies and make a few critical considerations about the powerfulness and draw-backs of the method.