IZw18, or the picture of Dorian Gray: the more you watch it, the older it gets

Abstract

IZw18 has been recurrently claimed to be a young galaxy, but stars of increasingly older ages are found every time deeper magnitude levels are reached with high-resolution photometry: from the original few Myrs to, possibly, several Gyrs. We summarize the history of IZw18's age and an HST project which will allow us to derive both its distance and age.

2 pages, 3 figs, needs iaus.cls. Proceedings of the IAU Symp. 235 "Galaxies across the Hubble Time", held in Prague in August 2006, F. Combes and J. Palous eds