... luminosity

Throughout the paper, "luminosity'' will be a generic label for the stellar emission in any given band.

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... IMF

The isochrone is not monotonic, so that the integral limits of Eq. (5) do not correspond to those of Eq. (10).

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... ensemble

Strictly speaking, not all the luminosity sources contributing to the integrated luminosity of a stellar population need be stars, as they include, e.g., accretion disks or thermalization of kinetic energy. Accordingly, one should in principle use the more general expression "luminosity sources'' rather than "stars'' to avoid loss of generality. This distinction, however, is not relevant for our scope here, since in our treatment any luminosity source can be reconducted to a star. Therefore, in the following we will use "stars'' and "luminosity sources'' as synonyms.

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...Marigo & Girardi (2001)

These models are available at http://pleiadi.pd.astro.it/

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... population

A further degree of freedom in Monte Carlo simulations is that they can be performed by either fixing the number of stars or the total stellar mass. This aspect will not be discussed here, and we will consider only Monte Carlo simulations with a fixed number of stars.

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...randomness

This is by itself, of course, a strong physical assumption. If, for example, mass segregation affects star formation, then this assumption would be false. In that case, the whole problem should be restated, since the mechanism of star formation should be incorporated in the star formation history.

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... sed@

sed@ is a synthesis code included in the Spanish Virtual Observatory and the Violent Star Formation Legacy Tool project by means of the PGos3 tool. The code is written in ANSI C under GNU Public License and, currently, is managed by M. Cerviño; use of the code and its results must be referred to solely by its documentation (Sed@ Reference Manual, in preparation), its WWW address and the citations in the headers of the output VO Tables. The code is currently accessible on-line at http://ov.inaoep.mx/. Its inclusion in the VO service grid is under way.

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