Related papers: The Pleiades mass function: models versus observat…
Much of our knowledge of galaxies comes from analysing the radiation emitted by their stars. It depends on the stellar initial mass function (IMF) describing the distribution of stellar masses when the population formed. Consequently…
A dense-enough gas-accumulation evolves, over a few Myr of intensifying star formation, to an embedded cluster. If it contains a sufficient amount of mass, O stars form and explosively expel the remaining gas, whereas poorer clusters reduce…
Few topics in astronomy initiate such vigorous discussion as whether or not the initial mass function (IMF) of stars is universal, or instead sensitive to the initial conditions of star formation. The distinction is of critical importance:…
In clustered environments, stellar encounters can liberate planets from their host stars via close encounters. Although the detection probability of planets suggests that the planet population in open clusters resembles that in the field,…
The manner in which the stellar initial mass function (IMF) scales with global galaxy properties is under debate. We use two hydrodynamical, cosmological simulations to predict possible trends for two self-consistent variable IMF…
We present near-infrared $J$, $H$, and $K$ images of four embedded stellar clusters in the Galaxy. We find a significant fraction of pre-main-sequence stars present in at least one of the clusters. For the clusters dominated by…
Residual-gas expulsion after cluster formation has recently been shown to leave an imprint in the low-mass present-day stellar mass function (PDMF) which allowed the estimation of birth conditions of some Galactic globular clusters (GCs)…
We determine the mass functions (MFs) and the dynamical parameters of 15 nearby open clusters (OCs) using the unprecedented data set of the Gaia Early Data Release 3. We select the members of each cluster by combining the photometric…
In this contributed talk I present recent results on the connection between stellar population properties and the normalisation of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) measured using stellar dynamics, based on a large sample of 260…
The distribution of core radii of rich clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) systematically increases in both upper limit and spread with increasing cluster age. Cluster-to-cluster variations in the stellar initial mass function…
The observed distribution of IMF shapes can be understood as statistical sampling from a universal IMF and variations that result from stellar-dynamical processes. However, young star clusters appear to have an IMF biased towards low-mass…
We have obtained images of the Trapezium Cluster (140" x 140"; 0.3 pc x 0.3 pc) with the Hubble Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Combining these data with new ground-based K-band spectra (R=800)…
Most structural and evolutionary properties of galaxies strongly rely on the stellar initial mass function (IMF), namely the distribution of the stellar mass formed in each episode of star formation. As the IMF shapes the stellar population…
We investigated a volume-limited sample of LAMOST main-sequence stars with masses from 0.25 to 1 $M_{\odot}$ and distances of 150-350 pc to explore how the stellar initial mass function (IMF) varies with metallicity. We corrected the…
An essential component of galaxy formation theory is the stellar initial mass function (IMF), that describes the parent distribution of stellar mass in star forming regions. We present observational evidence in a sample of early-type…
The observed stellar initial mass function (IMF) appears to vary, becoming bottom-heavy in the centres of the most massive, metal-rich early-type galaxies. It is still unclear what physical processes might cause this IMF variation. In this…
In this paper we compare the mass function slopes of Galactic globular clusters recently determined by Sollima & Baumgardt (2017) with a set of dedicated N-body simulations of star clusters containing between 65,000 to 200,000 stars. We…
We have obtained near-IR observations of some of the faintest objects so far known towards the Pleiades cluster, with the aim of investigating the sequence that connects cluster very low-mass (VLM) stars with substellar objects. We find…
We conducted a search for brown dwarfs (BDs) and very low mass (VLM) stars in the 625 Myr-old Hyades cluster in order to derive the cluster's mass function across the stellar-substellar boundary. We performed a deep (I=23, z=22.5)…
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…