Talk Title: The Age of M32
Abstract: It is a long debate whether our nearest elliptical galaxy, M32, hosts a substantial young stellar component. The strong Hbeta indices have been usually interpreted as indication of a young population. However a young population is not the only possible explanation for the strong Hbeta in a composite system. Warm, old horizontal branch (HB) stars are equally important candidates. Due to the crowding, no observation so far could reach the turn-off or the HB in its total extension, so the debate on the origin of the strong Hbeta remains. The aim of this work is to explore the degeneracy between young ages and warm HB stars, and to estimate how much of warm HB stars are required to explain the integrated spectral indices of M32 using as a constraint the observed metallicity distribution for M32 of Grillmair et al. (1996). Future deeper CMDs will be able at verifying such prediction.
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