Stellar initial mass function in the 100-pc solar neighbourhood
Abstract
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is among the most fundamental distributions in astrophysics, defined as the mass spectrum of stars produced in a single star-formation event. Even in the solar neighbourhood, where measurements can be conducted via star counting, disentangling the IMF from observational effects remains challenging. In this work we introduce a new parametrisation of the stellar IMF in the 100-pc solar neighbourhood, leveraging the high-precision astrometric and photometric data from \textsl{Gaia} DR3: we model the colour-magnitude diagram of the field star population while accounting for observational uncertainties, Malmquist bias, Lutz-Kelker bias, variations in the mass-luminosity relation arising from metallicity differences, and the effects of unresolved binaries. In particular, we synthesise the binary population with a process imitating the dynamical evolution observed in star clusters to enforce that all components are drawn from the same IMF, while simultaneously recovering the observed present-day mass-ratio distribution. We determine an averaged stellar IMF over that aligns with canonical IMFs but achieves significantly tighter constraints: , , and a break point at . Our inference also yields an averaged binary fraction over of approximately 26\%, and constrains the \textsl{Gaia} DR3 angular resolution to arcsec. We also provide the -parameter for our IMF, which is , to facilitate direct comparison with other IMF determinations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2506.12987,
title = {Stellar initial mass function in the 100-pc solar neighbourhood},
author = {Yu-Ting Wang and Chao Liu and Jiadong Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.12987},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in MNRAS