Related papers: The Stellar "Snake" -- II: The Mass Function
This paper revisits the classical Kennicutt method for inferring the stellar initial mass function (IMF) from the integrated light properties of galaxies. The large size, uniform high quality data set from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR4…
We show the results of deep V and I HST photometry of 6 rich star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud with different ages and metallicities. The number of stars with measured magnitudes in each cluster varies from about 3000 to 10000. We…
In the first part of this article, we review observations of the mass and luminosity functions of young and old star cluster systems. We also review some of the physical processes that may determine the characteristic mass of globular…
We measure the stellar mass function (SMF) of galaxies in the COSMOS field up to $z\sim6$. We select them in the near-IR bands of the COSMOS2015 catalogue, which includes ultra-deep photometry from UltraVISTA-DR2, SPLASH, and…
As a young massive cluster in the Central Molecular Zone, the Arches cluster is a valuable probe of the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) in the extreme Galactic Center environment. We use multi-epoch Hubble Space Telescope observations…
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 initial mass function (IMF) is an essential tool with which to study star formation processes. We have initiated the photometric survey of young open clusters in the Galaxy, from which the stellar IMFs are obtained in a homogeneous way.…
MaNGA provides the opportunity to make precise spatially resolved measurements of the IMF slope in galaxies owing to its unique combination of spatial resolution, wavelength coverage and sample size. We derive radial gradients in age,…
Research on the high-mass end of the initial mass function (IMF) has been limited due to a scarcity of samples. Recently, Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), as the most efficient spectroscopic telescope, has…
Globular clusters are often assumed to be good tracers of major star formation episodes in their host galaxies. While observations over the past 2 decades have confirmed the presence of young objects with globular cluster-like properties in…
Stars form in dense, dusty clumps of molecular clouds, but little is known about their origin and evolution. In particular, the relationship between the mass distribution of these clumps (also known as the "clump mass function", or CMF) and…
Oxygen to iron abundance ratios of metal-poor stars provide information on nucleosynthesis yields from massive stars which end in Type II supernova explosions. Using a standard model of chemical evolution of the Galaxy we have reproduced…
It is now well-established that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) can be determined from the absorption line spectra of old stellar systems, and this has been used to measure the IMF and its variation across the early-type galaxy…
Observations of the stellar initial mass function are reviewed. The flattening at low mass is evidence for a characteristic mass in star formation, which could be the minimum stellar mass for the onset of deuterium burning or the thermal…
The possibility that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) arises mostly from cloud structure is investigated with fractal Brownian motion (fBm) clouds that have power-law power spectra. An fBm cloud with a realistic projected power…
We present new measurements of the velocity dispersions of eleven Local Group globular clusters using spatially integrated spectra, to expand our sample of clusters with precise integrated-light velocity dispersions to 29, over 4 different…
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…
Accurate specification of a likelihood function is becoming increasingly difficult in many inference problems in astronomy. As sample sizes resulting from astronomical surveys continue to grow, deficiencies in the likelihood function lead…
We study the stellar mass function (SMF) and the co-evolution with dark matter halos via abundance matching in the largest redshift range to date $0.2<z<12$ in $0.53 \, {\rm deg}^2$ imaged by JWST from the COSMOS-Web survey. At $z>5$, we…
We present a new determination of the galaxy stellar mass function (GSMF) over the redshift interval $0.25 \leq z \leq 3.75$, derived from a combination of ground-based and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging surveys. Based on a near-IR…