  The UV upturn is the rising flux with decreasing wavelength between the Lyman
limit and 2500\AA found virtually in all bright spheroidal galaxies. It has
been a mystery ever since it was first detected by the OAO-2 space telescope
(Code & Welch 1979) because such old metal-rich populations were not expected
to contain any substantial number of hot stars. It was confirmed by following
space missions, ANS (de Boer 1982), IUE (Bertola et al. 1982) and HUT (Brown et
al. 1997). The positive correlation between the UV-to-optical colour (i.e., the
strength of the UV upturn) and the Mg2 line strength found by Burstein et al.
(1987) through IUE observations has urged theorists to construct novel
scenarios in which metal-rich ($\gtrsim Z_{\odot}$) old ($\gtrsim$ a few Gyr)
stars become UV bright (Greggio & Renzini 1990; Horch et al. 1992). Also
interesting was to find using HUT that, regardless of the UV strength, the UV
spectral slopes at 1000--2000\AA in the six UV bright galaxies were nearly
identical suggesting a very small range of temperatures of the UV sources in
these galaxies (Brown et al. 1997), which corresponds to $T_{\rm eff} \approx
20,000 \pm 3,000$ K. This, together with other evidence, effectively ruled out
young stars as the main driver of the UV upturn. A good review on the
observational side of the story is given in the next article by Tom Brown, as
well as in the recent articles of Greggio & Renzini (1999) and O'Connell
(1999).
