The Star Formation Histories of Local Group Dwarf Galaxies I. Hubble Space Telescope / Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 Observations

Abstract: We present uniformly measured star formation histories (SFHs) of 40 Local Group dwarf galaxies based on color-magnitude diagram (CMD) analysis from archival Hubble Space Telescope imaging. We demonstrate that accurate SFHs can be recovered from CMDs that do not reach the oldest main sequence turn-off (MSTO), but emphasize that the oldest MSTO is critical for precisely constraining the earliest epochs of star formation. We find that: (1) the average lifetime SFHs of dwarf spheroidals (dSphs) can be approximated by an exponentially declining SFH with $\tau$ $\sim$ 5 Gyr; (2) lower luminosity dSphs are less likely to have extended SFHs than more luminous dSphs; (3) the average SFHs of dwarf irregulars (dIrrs), transition dwarfs (dTrans), and dwarf ellipticals (dEs) can be approximated by the combination of an exponentially declining SFH ($\tau$ $\sim$ 3-4 Gyr) for lookback ages $>$ 10-12 Gyr ago and a constant SFH thereafter; (4) the observed fraction of stellar mass formed prior to z=2 ranges considerably (80\% for galaxies with M $<$ 10$^5$ M${\odot}$ to 30\% for galaxies with M$>$10$^7$ M${\odot}$) and is largely explained by environment; (5) the distinction between "ultra-faint" and "classical" dSphs is arbitrary; (6) LG dIrrs formed a significantly higher fraction of stellar mass prior to z=2 than the SDSS galaxies from Leiter 2012 and the SFHs from the abundance matching models of Behroozi et al. 2013. This may indicate higher than expected star-formation efficiencies at early times in low mass galaxies. Finally, we provide all the SFHs in tabulated electronic format for use by the community.