Limit Processes for Age-Dependent Branching Particle Systems

We consider systems of spatially distributed branching particles in R ^d . The particle lifelengths are of general form, hence the time propagation of the system is typically not Markov. A natural time-space-mass scaling is applied to a sequence of particle systems and we derive limit results for the corresponding sequence of measure-valued processes. The limit is identified as the projection on R ^d of a superprocess in R ₊×R ^d . The additive functional characterizing the superprocess is the scaling limit of certain point processes, which count generations along a line of descent for the branching particles.