Related papers: Understanding the IMF
Supersonic turbulence fragments the interstellar medium into dense sheets, filaments, cores and large low density voids. The turbulence is driven on large scales, probably predominantly by supernovae. The scaling properties of supersonic…
We present a model for the star formation process during the initial collapse of dark matter haloes at redshifts z=0-30. We derive a simple expression for the characteristic stellar mass scale during this initial burst of star formation. In…
Ongoing surveys are in the process of measuring the chemical abundances in large numbers of stars, with the ultimate goal of reconstructing the formation history of the Milky Way using abundances as tracers. However, interpretation of these…
Within the birth environment of a massive globular cluster, the combination of a luminous young stellar population and a high column density induces a state in which the thermal optical depth and radiation pressure are both appreciable. In…
In cold dark matter cosmological models, the first stars to form are believed to do so within small protogalaxies. We wish to understand how the evolution of these early protogalaxies changes once the gas forming them has been enriched with…
Several observational and theoretical studies suggest that the initial mass function (IMF) slope for massive stars in globular clusters (GCs) depends on the initial cloud density and metallicity, such that the IMF becomes increasingly…
Stars form from dense molecular cores, and the mass function of these cores (the CMF) is often found to be similar to the form of the stellar initial mass function (IMF). This suggests that the form of the IMF is the result of the form of…
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…
Using hydrodynamic simulations we investigate the time evolution and fragmentation of regions within molecular clouds which have lost their turbulent support leading to gravitational contraction. The initial density distributions are…
The first stars fundamentally transformed the early Universe through their production of energetic radiation and the first heavy chemical elements. The impact on cosmic evolution sensitively depends on their initial mass function (IMF),…
We perform linear analysis of thermal instability in a contracting large cloud filled with warm HI gas and investigate the effect of metallicity and radiation flux. When the cloud reaches critical density n_f, the cloud fragments into cool,…
The current knowledge on the stellar IMF is documented. It appears to become top-heavy when the star-formation rate density surpasses about 0.1Msun/(yr pc^3) on a pc scale and it may become increasingly bottom-heavy with increasing…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is commonly interpreted to be a scale-invariant probability density distribution function (PDF) such that many small clusters yield the same IMF as one massive cluster of the same combined number of…
In order to constrain the initial mass function of the first generation of stars (Population III), one has to study the fragmentation properties of primordial gas. We present results from 3D simulations, based on Smoothed Particle…
The stellar mass distribution in star-forming regions, stellar clusters and associations, the Initial Mass Function (IMF), appears to be invariant across different star-forming environments, and is consistent with the IMF observed in the…
This work presents and releases a catalog of new photometrically-derived physical properties for the $\sim 10^5$ most well-measured galaxies in the COSMOS field on the sky. Using a recently developed technique, spectral energy distributions…
Fragmentation is a key step in the process of transforming clouds (and their substructures such as filaments, clumps, and cores) into protostars. The thermal gas pressure and gravitational collapse are believed to be the primary agents…
Infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) are cold and dense reservoirs of gas potentially available to form stars. Many of these clouds are likely to be pristine structures representing the initial conditions for star formation. The study presented…
We study gravitational collapse of low-metallicity gas clouds and the formation of protostars by three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations. Grain growth, non-equilibrium chemistry, molecular cooling, and chemical heating are solved in a…
There is substantial evidence that the initial mass function (IMF) may be a function of the local star formation conditions. In particular, the IMF is predicted to flatten with increasing local luminosity density, with the formation of…