Related papers: On some Uncertainties in Evolutionary Synthesis Mo…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) describes the distribution in stellar masses produced from a burst of star formation. For more than fifty years, the implicit assumption underpinning most areas of research involving the IMF has been…
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…
Any predictive theory of star formation must explain observed variations (or lack thereof) in the initial mass function. Recent work suggests that we might expect quantitative variations in the IMF as a function of metallicity (Larson 2005)…
We reconsider the issue of proving large scale spatial homogeneity of the universe, given isotropic observations about us and the possibility of source evolution both in numbers and luminosities. Two theorems make precise the freedom…
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 measured star-formation rates (SFRs) of galaxies comprise an important constraint on galaxy evolution and also on their cosmological boundary conditions. Any available tracer of the SFR depends on the shape of the mass-distribution of…
We have carried out a set of Monte Carlo simulations to study a number of fundamental aspects of the dynamical evolution of multiple stellar populations in globular clusters with different initial masses, fractions of second generation (2G)…
Peaks and lulls in the star formation rate (SFR) over the history of the Galaxy produce plateaux and declines in the present day mass function (PDMF) where the main-sequence lifetime overlaps the age and duration of the SFR variation. These…
Recent hydrodynamical simulations predict that stellar feedback in intermediate mass galaxies (IMGs) can drive strong fluctuations in structure (e.g., half-light radius, $R_e$). This process operates on timescales of only a few hundred Myr…
During the last few years, the Geneva stellar evolution group has released new grids of stellar models, including the effect of rotation and with updated physical inputs (Ekstr\"om et al. 2012; Georgy et al. 2013a,b). To ease the comparison…
We investigate the pulsational properties of Pre--Main-Sequence (PMS) stars by means of linear and nonlinear calculations. The equilibrium models were taken from models evolved from the protostellar birthline to the ZAMS for masses in the…
Rotational mixing in massive stars is a widely applied concept, with far reaching consequences for stellar evolution. Nitrogen surface abundances for a large and homogeneous sample of massive B-type stars in the LMC were obtained by the…
Recent evidence based independently on spectral line strengths and dynamical modelling point towards a non-universal stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF), probably implying an excess of low-mass stars in elliptical galaxies with a high…
We demonstrate that the mass of the most massive star in a cluster correlates non-trivially with the cluster mass. A simple algorithm according to which a cluster is filled up with stars that are chosen randomly from the standard IMF but…
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…
Recent observations of rapidly rotating stars have revealed the presence of regular patterns in their pulsation spectra. This has raised the question as to their physical origin, and in particular, whether they can be explained by an…
Over the last half-century quantitative stellar spectroscopy has made great progress. However, most stellar abundance analyses today still employ rather simplified models, which can introduce severe systematic errors swamping the…
One-dimensional stellar evolution models have been successful at representing the structure and evolution of stars in diverse astrophysical contexts, but complications have been noted in the context of young, magnetically active stars, as…
Several recent observational studies have concluded that the initial mass function (IMF) of stars varies systematically with galaxy properties such as velocity dispersion. In this paper, we investigate the effect of linking the circular…
Recent papers have found that the inferred slope of the high-mass ($>1.5$ M$_\odot$) IMF for field stars in the solar vicinity has a larger value ($\sim 1.7-2.1$) than the slopes ($\sim 1.2-1.7$; Salpeter= 1.35) inferred from numerous…