Recovering the Star Formation Rate in the Solar Neighborhood

This paper develops a method for obtaining the star formation histories of a mixed, resolved population through the use of color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs). The method is applied to the derivation of the local star formation rate, analyzing the observations of the Hipparcos satellite through a comparison with synthetic CMDs computed for different star formation histories with an updated stellar evolution library. Parallax and photometric uncertainties are included explicitly and corrected using the Bayesian Richardson-Lucy algorithm. We find that the solar neighborhood star formation rate has a characteristic timescale for variation of about 6 Gyr, with a maximum activity close to 3 Gyr ago