English

The IMF package: a toolkit implementing mass functions and statistical tools to analyze them

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2026-07-28 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Mass functions are used in all areas of astrophysics. The stellar initial mass function (IMF), in particular, plays a central role in modeling stellar populations in galaxies. However, few dedicated tools for working directly with the IMF and its precursor functions are widely available. We present the imf\texttt{imf} package, a Python library integrated into the wider scientific Python ecosystem that implements common and variant forms of mass functions, especially the IMF and its pre- and protostellar equivalents, as probability distribution functions based on SciPy's statistics architecture. This package enables the performance of operations such as sampling and integration on a wide array of highly customizable mass functions. imf\texttt{imf} is publicly available on the Python package index pypi\texttt{pypi} under the project name \texttt{initial_mass_function}.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.26007,
  title  = {The IMF package: a toolkit implementing mass functions and statistical tools to analyze them},
  author = {Theo Richardson and Adam Ginsburg and Sergey Koposov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.26007},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

18 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Includes appendix: 3 pages, 1 figure. To be published in AJ. imf is accessible on pypi at https://pypi.org/project/initial-mass-function and has a GitHub repository at https://github.com/keflavich/imf