Related papers: The Substellar Mass Function: A Bayesian Approach
The amount of mass contained in low-mass objects is investigated anew. Instead of using a mass-luminosity relation to convert a luminosity function to a mass function, I predict the mass-luminosity relation from assumed mass functions and…
After decades of brown dwarf discovery and follow-up, we can now infer the functional form of the mass distribution within 20 parsecs, which serves as a constraint on star formation theory at the lowest masses. Unlike objects on the main…
The stellar mass function is one of the fundamental distributions of stellar astrophysics. Its form at masses similar to the Sun was found by Salpeter (1955) to be a power-law $m^{-\alpha}$ with a slope of $\alpha=1.35$. Since then the mass…
We present measurements of the luminosity and mass functions of low-mass stars constructed from a catalog of matched Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) detections. This photometric catalog contains more than…
A complete accounting of nearby objects -- from the highest-mass white dwarf progenitors down to low-mass brown dwarfs -- is now possible, thanks to an almost complete set of trigonometric parallax determinations from Gaia, ground-based…
Analysis of initial observations from near-infrared sky surveys has shown that the resulting photometric catalogues, combined with far-red optical data, provide an extremely effective method of finding isolated, very low-temperature objects…
Monte Carlo simulations of the field substellar mass function (MF) are presented. Starting from various representations of the MF below 0.1 M$_{\sun}$ and the stellar birth rate, luminosity functions (LFs) and T$_{eff}$ distributions are…
A Bayesian statistical formalism is developed to quantify the level at which the mass function slope (alpha) and the projected cumulative mass fraction (f) of (CDM) substructure in strong gravitational-lens galaxies, with arcs or Einstein…
In this review, we examine the successes and weaknesses of modern low-mass star and brown dwarf theory.(1) We first focus on the mechanical (equation of state) and thermal (atmosphere) properties and on the evolution. We then examine the…
We use a large sample of galaxies from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to calculate galaxy luminosity and stellar mass functions in the local Universe. We estimate k-corrections, evolution…
In this paper, we use the general theory worked out within the past few years for the structure and the evolution of low-mass stars to derive the stellar mass-function in the Galactic disk down to the vicinity of the hydrogen-burning limit,…
We present the results of a search for galaxy substructures in a sample of 11 gravitational lens galaxies from the Sloan Lens ACS Survey. We find no significant detection of mass clumps, except for a luminous satellite in the system SDSS…
We use recent low-mass star models, which reproduce accurately the observed sequences of various globular clusters, to convert the observed luminosity functions into bolometric luminosity functions and mass functions down to the bottom of…
We present a probabilistic approach for inferring the parameters of the present day power-law stellar mass function (MF) of a resolved young star cluster. This technique (a) fully exploits the information content of a given dataset; (b)…
We combine results from imaging searches for substellar objects in the sigma Orionis cluster and follow-up photometric and spectroscopic observations to derive a census of the brown dwarf population in a region of 847 arcmin^2. We identify…
The halo mass function, encoding the comoving number density of dark matter halos of a given mass, plays a key role in understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies. As such, it is a key goal of current and future deep optical…
We investigate the mass function of cold, dusty clumps in 11 low- and high-mass star-forming regions. Using a homogeneous fitting technique, we analyze the shape of each region's clump mass function and examine the commonalities among them.…
The dichotomy between a universal mass function (IMF) and a variable IMF which depends on local physical parameters characterises observational and theoretical stellar astronomy. In this contribution the available distributions of…
The scaling relation between stellar mass ($M_{*}$) and physical effective radius ($r_{e}$) has been well-studied using wide spectroscopic surveys. However, these surveys suffer from severe surface brightness incompleteness in the dwarf…
I use a sample of more than 120,000 stars in the solar neighbourhood with parallaxes, magnitudes and colours estimated with unprecedented accuracy by the second data release of the Gaia mission to derive the initial mass function of the…