Related papers: Evidence for top-heavy stellar initial mass functi…
Peaks and lulls in the star formation rate (SFR) over the history of the Galaxy produce plateaux and declines in the present day mass function (PDMF) where the main-sequence lifetime overlaps the age and duration of the SFR variation. These…
Observations show that galaxies follow a mass-metallicity relation over a wide range of masses. One currently favoured explanation is that less massive galaxies are less able to retain the gas and stellar ejecta and thus may lose the…
Gaseous and stellar metallicities in galaxies are nowadays routinely used to constrain the evolutionary processes in galaxies. This requires the knowledge of the average yield per stellar generation, $y_{\text{Z}}$, i.e. the quantity of…
We describe the use of our chemical evolution model to reproduce the abundance patterns observed in a catalog of elliptical galaxies from the SDSS DR4. The model assumes ellipticals form by fast gas accretion, and suffer a strong burst of…
Stars formed in galaxy cluster potential wells must be responsible for the high level of enrichment measured in the intracluster medium (ICM); however, there is increasing tension between this truism and the parsimonious assumption that the…
Here I discuss recent work on brown dwarfs, massive stars and the IMF in general. The stellar IMF can be well described by an invariant two-part power law in present-day star-formation events within the Local Group of galaxies. It is nearly…
We present high-resolution simulations of tidal dwarf galaxies (TDG) to investigate their early chemo-dynamical evolution and test their survivability. In this work the simulation setup is introduced and the response of TDGs to…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) describes the distribution of stellar masses that form in a given star formation event. The long main-sequence lifetimes of low-mass stars mean that the IMF in this regime (below $\sim 1…
A promising mechanism to form intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) is the runaway merger in dense star clusters, where main-sequence stars collide and form a very massive star (VMS), which then collapses to a black hole. In this paper we…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is fundamental for many areas of astrophysics, but its origin remains poorly understood. It may be inherited from the core mass function (CMF) or arise as a result of more chaotic, competitive…
We use a recently-developed analytic model for the ISM structure from scales of GMCs through star-forming cores to explore how the pre-stellar core mass function (CMF) and, by extrapolation, stellar initial mass function (IMF) should depend…
The stellar mass distribution in star-forming regions, stellar clusters and associations, the Initial Mass Function (IMF), appears to be invariant across different star-forming environments, and is consistent with the IMF observed in the…
The essential features of the stellar Initial Mass Function are, rather generally, (1) a peak at a mass of a few tenths of a solar mass, and (2) a power-law tail toward higher masses that is similar to the original Salpeter function. Recent…
The first generations of stars ionised and enriched their host galaxies and seeded the growth of massive black holes. Models often assume that Pop III stellar masses in different minihaloes are stochastic realisations of a single universal…
Evolution of the mass function (MF) and radial distribution (RD) of the Galactic globular cluster (GC) system is calculated using an advanced and a realistic Fokker-Planck (FP) model that considers dynamical friction, disc/bulge shocks and…
The observed mass-to-light ($M/L$) ratios of a large sample of GCs in M31 show an inverse trend with metallicity compared to what is expected from Simple Stellar Population (SSP) models with an invariant canonical stellar IMF, in the sense…
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 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…
We perform a series of three-dimensional, magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations of star cluster formation including gravity, turbulence, magnetic fields, stellar radiative heating and outflow feedback. We observe that the inclusion of…
A universal stellar initial mass function (IMF) should not be expected from theoretical models of star formation, but little conclusive observational evidence for a variable IMF has been uncovered. In this paper, a parameterization of the…