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Spectral population synthesis (PS) is a fundamental tool in extragalacticresearch that aims to decipher the assembly history of galaxies from their SED.However, until recently all PS codes were restricted to purely stellar fits,neglecting the essential contribution of nebular emission (NE). With the adventof FADO, the now possible self-consistent modelling of stellar and NE opens newroutes to the exploration of galaxy SFHs. The main goal of this study is toquantitatively explore the accuracy to which FADO can recover physical andevolutionary properties of galaxies and compare its output with that frompurely stellar PS codes. With this in mind, FADO and STARLIGHT were applied tosynthetic SEDs that track the spectral evolution of stars and gas inextinction-free mock galaxies that form their stellar mass ($M_\star$)according to different parametric SFHs. Spectral fits were computed for twodifferent set-ups that approximate the spectral range of SDSS and CALIFA data.Our analysis indicates that FADO can recover the key physical and evolutionaryproperties of galaxies, such as $M_\star$ and mass- and light-weighted mean ageand metallicity, with an accuracy better than 0.2 dex. This is the case even inphases of strongly elevated sSFR and thus with considerable NE contamination.As for STARLIGHT, our analysis documents a moderately good agreement withtheoretical values only for evolutionary phases for which NE drops to lowlevels. Indeed, fits with STARLIGHT during phases of high sSFR severelyoverestimate both $M_\star$ and the mass-weighted stellar age, whereas stronglyunderestimate the light-weighted age and metallicity. The insights from thisstudy suggest that the neglect of nebular continuum emission in STARLIGHT andsimilar purely stellar PS codes could systematically impact $M_\star$ and SFHestimates for star-forming galaxies.

Self-consistent population spectral synthesis with FADO - I. The importance of nebular emission in modelling star-forming galaxies