Related papers: The influence of the cloud virial parameter on the…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is commonly assumed to be an invariant probability density distribution function of initial stellar masses being represented by the canonical IMF. As a consequence the galaxy-wide IMF (gwIMF), defined…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) plays a crucial role in determining the number of surviving stars in galaxies, the chemical composition of the interstellar medium, and the distribution of light in galaxies. A key unsolved question…
Understanding the processes that determine the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) is a critical unsolved problem, with profound implications for many areas of astrophysics. In molecular clouds, stars are formed in cores, gas condensations…
Recent studies proposed that cosmic rays (CR) are a key ingredient in setting the conditions for star formation, thanks to their ability to alter the thermal and chemical state of dense gas in the UV-shielded cores of molecular clouds. In…
While the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) appears to be close to universal within the Milky Way galaxy, it is strongly suspected to be different in the primordial Universe, where molecular hydrogen cooling is less efficient and the gas…
It is believed that the majority of stars form in clusters. Therefore it is likely that the gas physical conditions that prevail in forming clusters, largely determine the properties of stars that form and in particular the initial mass…
We investigate how the dynamical state of a turbulently supported, 1000 solar mass, molecular cloud affects the properties of the cluster it forms, focusing our discussion on the star formation efficiency (SFE) and the initial mass function…
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…
Because direct measurements require resolved stellar populations including low-mass stars, determining the stellar initial mass function (IMF) has been a historically difficult problem even within our own Galaxy and impossible everywhere…
The current status of both the observational evidence and the theory of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is reviewed, with particular attention to the two basic, apparently universal features shown by all observations of nearby…
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…
The theory for the formation of the first population of stars (Pop III) predicts an initial mass function (IMF) dominated by high-mass stars, in contrast to the present-day IMF, which tends to yield mostly stars with masses less than 1…
Two varieties of the universal stellar initial mass function (IMF) viz., the Kroupa and the Chabrier IMF, have emerged over the last decade to explain the observed distribution of stellar masses. The possibility of the universal nature of…
We review star formation in molecular clouds and describe why magnetic fields may be important and how they can influence filamentary structure and the column density probability distribution function (PDF). We also comment on the origin of…
As star-forming clouds collapse, the gas within them fragments to ever-smaller masses. Naively one might expect this process to continue down to the smallest mass that is able to radiate away its binding energy on a dynamical timescale, the…
Recent observational evidence for initial mass function (IMF) variations in massive quiescent galaxies at $z = 0$ challenges the long-established paradigm of a universal IMF. While a few theoretical models relate the IMF to birth cloud…
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 present a simple statistical analysis of recent numerical simulations exploring the correlation between the core mass function obtained from the fragmentation of a molecular cloud and the stellar mass function which forms from these…
Although the stellar initial mass function (IMF) has only been directly determined in star clusters it has been manifoldly applied on galaxy-wide scales. But taking the clustered nature of star formation into account the galaxy-wide IMF is…
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…