Related papers: Is There a Universal Mass Function?
We have determined stellar mass functions of 120 Milky Way globular clusters and massive LMC/SMC star clusters based on a comparison of archival Hubble Space Telescope photometry with a large grid of direct N-body simulations. We find a…
The dark matter halo mass function is a key repository of cosmological information over a wide range of mass scales, from individual galaxies to galaxy clusters. N-body simulations have established that the friends-of-friends (FOF) mass…
In the past years a wealth of observations has allowed us to unravel the structural properties of the Dark and Luminous mass distribution in spirals. As result, it has been found that their rotation curves follow, out their virial radius,…
We place limits on the mean density of the universe and the slope of the linear power spectrum around a megaparsec scale by comparing the universal mass function to the observed luminosity function. Numerical simulations suggest that the…
We use large cosmological N-body simulations to study the subhalo population in galaxy group sized halos. In particular, we look for fossil group candidates with typical masses ~10-25% of Virgo cluster but with an order of magnitude less…
In this paper, we use the general theory worked out within the past few years for the structure and the evolution of low-mass stars to derive the stellar mass-function in the Galactic disk down to the vicinity of the hydrogen-burning limit,…
The evidence of the phenomenon for which, in galaxies, the gravitating mass is distributed differently than the luminous mass, increases as new data become available. Furthermore, this discrepancy is well structured and it depends on the…
We analyze the three catalogs of nearby loose groups identified by Garcia (1993). She used a percolation and a hierarchical method, and proposed a third group catalog defined as a combination of the two. Each catalog contains almost 500…
For any assumed stellar Initial Mass Function, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) gives a precise determination of the stellar mass function of galaxies for 10^8 M_sun < M_* < 10^12 M_sun. Within the concordance LCDM cosmology, the…
The distribution of stellar masses that form in one star-formation event in a given volume of space is called the initial mass function (IMF). The IMF has been estimated from low-mass brown dwarfs to very massive stars. Combining IMF…
Mass models of 15 nearby dwarf and spiral galaxies are presented. The galaxies are selected to be homogeneous in terms of the method used to determine their distances, the sampling of their rotation curves (RCs) and the mass-to-light ratio…
Dark matter-dominated cluster-scale halos act as an important cosmological probe and provide a key testing ground for structure formation theory. Focusing on their mass profiles, we have carried out (gravity-only) simulations of the…
It is widely recognized that cold dark matter models predict abundant dark matter substructure in halos of all sizes. Galaxy-galaxy lensing provides a unique opportunity to directly measure the presence and the mass of such substructures in…
The dichotomy between a universal mass function (IMF) and a variable IMF which depends on local physical parameters characterises observational and theoretical stellar astronomy. In this contribution the available distributions of…
Accurate measurements of the mass distribution in galaxy and cluster halos are essential to test the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm. The cosmological model predicts a universal shape for the density profile in all halos, independent of…
We calculate the most massive object in the Universe, finding it to be a cluster of galaxies with total mass M_200=3.8e15 Msun at z=0.22, with the 1 sigma marginalized regions being 3.3e15 Msun<M<4.4e15 Msun and 0.12<z<0.36. We restrict…
The mass function of clusters of galaxies is determined from 400 deg^2 of early commissioning imaging data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; ~300 clusters in the redshift range z = 0.1 - 0.2 are used. Clusters are selected using two…
A complete accounting of nearby objects -- from the highest-mass white dwarf progenitors down to low-mass brown dwarfs -- is now possible, thanks to an almost complete set of trigonometric parallax determinations from Gaia, ground-based…
Dark-matter halos are the scaffolding around which galaxies and clusters are built. They form when the gravitational instability of primordial density fluctuations causes regions which are denser than average to slow their cosmic expansion,…
The mass function of galaxy clusters is a sensitive tracer of the gravitational evolution of the cosmic large-scale structure and serves as an important census of the fraction of matter bound in large structures. We obtain the mass function…