Related papers: The Initial Mass Function and its Variation
Our understanding of stellar systems depends on the adopted interpretation of the IMF, phi(m). Unfortunately, there is not a common interpretation of the IMF, which leads to different methodologies and diverging analysis of observational…
Cosmological simulations are reaching the resolution necessary to study ultra-faint dwarf galaxies. Observations indicate that in small populations, the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is not fully populated; rather, stars are sampled…
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…
In the present work we examined the hypothesis that, a core mass function (CMF), such as the one deduced for cores in the Orion molecular cloud (OMC), could possibly be the primogenitor of the stellar initial mass function (IMF). Using the…
Given a flurry of recent claims for systematic variations in the stellar initial mass function (IMF), we carry out the first inventory of the observational evidence using different approaches. This includes literature results, as well as…
Many results in modern astrophysics rest on the notion that the Initial Mass Function (IMF) is universal. Our observations of HI selected galaxies in the light of H-alpha and the far-ultraviolet (FUV) challenge this notion. The flux ratio…
The stellar initial mass function (sIMF) is often treated as a stochastic probability distribution, yet such an interpretation implies Poisson noise that is inconsistent with growing observational evidence. In particular, the observed…
When star clusters are formed at low star-formation rates (SFRs), their stellar initial mass function (IMF) can hardly be filled continuously with stars at each mass. This lack holds for massive stars and is observationally verified by the…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is a fundamental property in the measurement of stellar masses and galaxy star formation histories. In this work we focus on the most massive galaxies in the nearby universe…
We present a thorough literature study of the most-massive star, m_max, in several young star clusters in order to assess whether or not star clusters are populated from the stellar initial mass function (IMF) by random sampling over the…
Observational studies are showing that the galaxy-wide stellar initial mass function are top-heavy in galaxies with high star-formation rates (SFRs). Calculating the integrated galactic stellar initial mass function (IGIMF) as a function of…
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…
In this work, we want to find out if the IMF can be determined from colour images, integrated colours, or mass-to-light ratios, especially at high redshift, where galaxies cannot be resolved into individual stars, which would enable us to…
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 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…
Observations of both galaxies in the distant Universe and local starbursts are showing increasing evidence for very hard ionizing spectra that stellar population synthesis models struggle to reproduce. Here we explore the effects of the…
The stellar initial mas function (IMF) has been described as being invariant, bottom heavy or top-heavy in extremely dense star burst conditions. To provide usable observable diagnostic we calculate redshift dependent spectral energy…
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…
We determine the initial mass function (IMF) of the ``thin disk'' by means of a direct comparison between synthetic stellar samples (for different matching choices of IMF, star formation rate SFR and depletion) and a complete…
Star formation in the early Universe has left its imprint on the chemistry of observable stars in galaxies. We derive elemental abundances and the slope of the low-mass end of the initial mass function (IMF) for a sample of 25 very massive…