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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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-06-17 Fabio Fontanot

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has uncovered an abundance of $z>10$ galaxies bright in the ultraviolet (UV) that has challenged traditional theoretical models at high redshifts. Recently, various new models have emerged to address…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-02-19 Anne Hutter , Elie R Cueto , Pratika Dayal , Stefan Gottlöber , Maxime Trebitsch , Gustavo Yepes

Dust is important for star formation because it is the crucial component that couples gas to stellar radiation fields, allowing radiation feedback to influence gas fragmentation and thus the stellar initial mass function (IMF). Variations…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-06-01 Tabassum S. Tanvir , Mark R. Krumholz

The initial mass function (IMF) is a key ingredient in many studies of galaxy formation and evolution. Although the IMF is often assumed to be universal, there is continuing evidence that it is not universal. Spectroscopic studies that…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-11-21 M. Dries , S. C. Trager , L. V. E. Koopmans , G. Popping , R. S. Somerville

The presence (and nature) of variations in the stellar initial mass function (IMF) at substantially sub-solar masses and metallicities ($m$$<$0.5M$_{\odot}$, [M/H]$\lesssim$$-$1) remains poorly constrained. Predictions from simulations vary…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-03-17 Roger E. Cohen , Mario Gennaro , Matteo Correnti , Kristen B. W. McQuinn , Vedant Chandra

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-01-17 R. P. V. Rautio , A. E. Watkins , H. Salo , A. Venhola , J. H. Knapen , S. Comerón

The debate about the universality of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) revolves around two competing lines of evidence. While measurements in the Milky Way, an archetypal spiral galaxy, seem to support an invariant IMF, the observed…

The recently inferred variations in the stellar initial mass function (IMF) among local high-mass early-type galaxies may require a reinterpretation of observations of galaxy populations and may have important consequences for the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-07-17 Christopher Barber , Robert A. Crain , Joop Schaye

A number of recent studies have proposed that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) of early type galaxies varies systematically as a function of galaxy mass, with higher mass galaxies having bottom heavy IMFs. These bottom heavy IMFs…

The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is predicted to depend upon the temperature of gas in star-forming molecular clouds. The introduction of an additional parameter, $T_{IMF}$ , into photometric template fitting, allows galaxies to be…

Several independent lines of evidence suggest that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) in early-type galaxies becomes increasingly `bottom-heavy' with increasing galaxy mass and/or velocity dispersion, sigma. Here we consider evidence…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-16 Charlie Conroy , Aaron A. Dutton , Genevieve J. Graves , J. Trevor Mendel , Pieter G. van Dokkum

Recent studies seem to suggest that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) in early-type galaxies might be different from a classical Kroupa or Chabrier IMF, i.e. contain a larger fraction of the total mass in low-mass stars. From a…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-08-05 Clio Bertelli Motta , Paul C. Clark , Simon C. O. Glover , Ralf S. Klessen , Anna Pasquali

The first stars are thought to be one of the dominant sources of hydrogen reionization in the early Universe, with their high luminosities and surface temperatures expected to drive high ionizing photon production rates. In this work, we…

We calculate the integrated galactic initial stellar mass function (IGIMF) in the presence of IMF variations in clusters. IMF Variations for a population of clusters are taken into account in the form of Gaussian distributions of the IMF…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-10-19 Sami Dib

Galaxy formation simulations frequently use Initial Mass Function (IMF) averaged feedback prescriptions, where star particles are assumed to represent single stellar populations that fully sample the IMF. This approximation breaks down at…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-04-22 Matthew C. Smith

We explore the assumption, widely used in many astrophysical calculations, that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is universal across all galaxies. By considering both a canonical Salpeter-like IMF and a non-universal IMF, we are able…

The combination of a finite time-scale for star formation, rapid early stellar evolution and rapid stellar-dynamical processes imply that the stellar IMF cannot be inferred for any star cluster independently of its age (the Cluster IMF…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-08-10 Pavel Kroupa

The initial mass function (IMF) of the first (Population III) stars and Population II (Pop II) stars is poorly known due to a lack of observations of the period between recombination and reionization. In simulations of the formation of the…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-28 Aycin Aykutalp , Marco Spaans

We investigate the time evolution and spatial variation of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) in star-forming disk galaxies by using chemodynamical simulations with an IMF model depending both on local densities and metallicities…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-12 Kenji Bekki , Gerhardt R. Meurer

Observational and theoretical arguments increasingly suggest that the initial mass function (IMF) of stars may depend systematically on environment, yet most galaxy formation models to date assume a universal IMF. Here we investigate…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-11-26 Thales A. Gutcke , Volker Springel