Related papers: Salpeter normalization of the Stellar Initial Mass…

A wealth of observations recently challenged the notion of a universal stellar initial mass function (IMF) by showing evidences in favour of a variability of this statistical indicator as a function of galaxy properties. I present…

The stellar masses, mean ages, metallicities, and star formation histories of galaxies are now commonly estimated via stellar population synthesis (SPS) techniques. SPS relies on stellar evolution calculations from the main sequence to…

The stellar initial mass function (IMF), which is often assumed to be universal across unresolved stellar populations, has recently been suggested to be "bottom-heavy" for massive ellipticals. In these galaxies, the prevalence of…

I provide estimates of the ultraviolet and visible light luminosity density at z~6 after accounting for the contribution from faint galaxies below the detection limit of deep Hubble and Spitzer surveys. I find the rest-frame V-band…

There is good evidence that the centers of massive early-type galaxies have a bottom-heavy stellar initial mass function (IMF) compared to the IMF of the Milky Way. Here we study the radial variation of the IMF within such galaxies, using a…

The galaxy-wide stellar initial mass function (IGIMF) of a galaxy is thought to depend on its star formation rate (SFR). Using a catalogue of observational properties of early-type galaxies (ETGs) and a relation that correlates the…

We have used a suite of simplified spectrophotometric spiral galaxy evolution models to argue that there are substantial variations in stellar mass-to-light ratios (M/Ls) within and among galaxies, amounting to factors of between 3 and 7 in…

From time to time, and quite more frequently in recent years, claims appear favoring a variable Initial Mass Function (IMF), one way or another, either in time or space. In this chapter we add our two pennies of wisdom, illustrating how the…

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 conduct a detailed investigation of the properties of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) in two massive early-type lens galaxies with velocity dispersions of sigma ~245 km/s and sigma ~325 km/s, for which both HST imaging and…

It is usually assumed that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) takes a universal form and that there exists a direct mapping between this and the distribution of natal core masses (the core mass function, CMF). The IMF and CMF have been…

We investigate whether the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is universal, or whether it varies significantly among young stellar clusters in the Milky Way. We propose a method to uncover the range of variation of the parameters that…

Star formation rates (SFR) larger than 1000 Msun/ yr are observed in extreme star bursts. This leads to the formation of star clusters with masses > 10^6 Msun in which crowding of the pre-stellar cores may lead to a change of the stellar…

The detection of numerous and relatively bright galaxies at redshifts z > 9 has prompted new investigations into the star-forming properties of high-redshift galaxies. Using local forms of the initial mass function (IMF) to estimate stellar…

Here we present a full description of the integrated galaxy-wide initial mass function (IGIMF) theory in terms of the optimal sampling and compare it with available observations. Optimal sampling is the method we use to discretize the IMF…

We investigate in massive early-type galaxies the variation of their two-dimensional central fraction of dark over total mass and dark matter density as a function of stellar mass, central stellar velocity dispersion, effective radius, and…

[abridged] We aim to constrain the stellar initial mass function (IMF) during the epoch of reionization. To this purpose, we build up a semi-empirical model for the reionization history of the Universe, based on various ingredients: the…

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…

We derive the number density evolution of massive field galaxies in the redshift range 0.4 < z < 1.2 using the K-band selected field galaxy sample from the Munich Near-IR Cluster Survey (MUNICS). We rely on spectroscopically calibrated…

We use the Fundamental Plane (FP) to measure the redshift evolution of the dynamical mass-to-light ratio ($M_{\mathrm{dyn}}/L$) and the dynamical-to-stellar mass ratio ($M_{\mathrm{dyn}}/M_*$). Although conventionally used to study the…