Related papers: Biases on initial mass function determinations. II…
The stellar mass distribution in star-forming regions, stellar clusters and associations, the Initial Mass Function (IMF), appears to be invariant across different star-forming environments, and is consistent with the IMF observed in the…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is a fundamental property of star formation, offering key insight into the physics driving the process as well as informing our understanding of stellar populations, their by-products, and their…
Recent results on the non-universality of the Initial Mass Function (IMF) have shown strong evidence of IMF variations with galaxy velocity dispersion, with a corresponding impact on other stellar population parameters, line indices and…
A brief review is given of the basic observed features of the stellar IMF, and also of some of the theoretical ideas and simulations that may help to explain these features. The characteristic stellar mass of order one solar mass may derive…
The stellar initial mass functions (IMFs) for the Galactic bulge, the Milky Way, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the integrated stars in the Universe are composites from countless individual IMFs in star clusters and associations…
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…
We demonstrate the feasibility of detecting directly low mass stars in unresolved super-star clusters with ages < 10 Myr using near-infrared spectroscopy at modest resolution (R ~ 1000). Such measurements could constrain the ratio of high…
If we accept a paradigm that star formation is a self-similar, hierarchical process, then the Salpeter slope of the IMF for high-mass stars can be simply and elegantly explained as follows. If the instrinsic IMF at the smallest scales…
A growing fraction of Simple Stellar Population (SSP) models, in an aim to create more realistic simulations capable of including stochastic variation in their outputs, begin their simulations with a distribution of discrete stars following…
Does the IMF vary? Is it significantly different in metal-rich environments than in metal-poor ones? Theoretical work predicts this to be the case. But in order to provide robust empirical evidence for this, the researcher must understand…
The massive Arches cluster near the Galactic center should be an ideal laboratory for investigating massive star formation under extreme conditions. But it comes at a high price: the cluster is hidden behind several tens of magnitudes of…
The frequency and properties of multiple star systems offer powerful tests of star formation models. Multiplicity surveys over the past decade have shown that binary properties vary strongly with mass, but the functional forms and the…
Cosmological simulations are reaching the resolution necessary to study ultra-faint dwarf galaxies. Observations indicate that in small populations, the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is not fully populated; rather, stars are sampled…
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…
The stellar initial mass function is of great significance for the study of star formation and galactic structure. Observations indicate that the IMF follows a power-law form. This work derived that when the expected number of stars formed…
The turnover in the stellar initial mass function (IMF) at low mass suggests the presence of two independent mass functions that combine in different ways above and below a characteristic mass given by the thermal Jeans mass in the cloud.…
We derive the expectation value for the maximum stellar mass (m_max) in an ensemble of N stars, as a function of the IMF upper-mass cutoff (m_up) and N. We statistically demonstrate that the upper IMF of the local massive star census…
We study the initial mass function (IMF) of one of the most massive Galactic star-forming regions NGC 3603 to answer a fundamental question in current astrophysics: is the IMF universal, or does it vary? Using our very deep, high angular…
The universality or non-universality of the initial mass function (IMF) has significant implications for determining star formation rates and star formation histories from photometric properties of stellar populations. We reexamine whether…
Globular clusters display an anticorrelation between the fraction of the first generation of stars ($N({\rm G1})/N({\rm tot})$) and the slope of the present-day mass function of the clusters ($\alpha_{pd}$), which is particularly…