Related papers: Numerical biases on IMF determinations created by …
Shaping axi-symmetric planetary nebulae is easier if a companion interacts with a primary at the top of the asymptotic giant branch. To determine the impact of binarity on planetary nebula formation and shaping, we need to determine the…
In this paper we explore the effects that the presence of a fraction of binary stars has in the determination of a star cluster mass via the virial theorem. To reach this aim in an accurate and consistent way, we run a set of simulations…
For an AI system to be reliable, the confidence it expresses in its decisions must match its accuracy. To assess the degree of match, examples are typically binned by confidence and the per-bin mean confidence and accuracy are compared.…
Obtaining accurate measurements of the initial mass function (IMF) is often considered to be the key to understanding star formation, and a universal IMF is often assumed to imply a universal star formation process. Here, we illustrate that…
The combination of a finite time-scale for star formation, rapid early stellar evolution and rapid stellar-dynamical processes imply that the stellar IMF cannot be inferred for any star cluster independently of its age (the Cluster IMF…
We describe three corrections that should be applied to the observed relative incidence of nearby stars hosting giant planets. These are diffusion in the stellar atmosphere, use of the [Ref] index in place of [Fe/H] for metallicity, and…
Several recent studies have suggested that circumstellar disks in young stellar binaries may be driven into misalignement with their host stars due to secular gravitational interactions between the star, disk and the binary companion. The…
Systematic variations of the IMF in early-type galaxies, and their connection with possible drivers such as velocity dispersion or metallicity, have been much debated in recent years. Strong lensing over galaxy scales combined with…
The turnover in the stellar initial mass function (IMF) at low mass suggests the presence of two independent mass functions that combine in different ways above and below a characteristic mass given by the thermal Jeans mass in the cloud.…
This contribution describes the difficult task of inferring the IMF from local star-count data, by discussing the mass-luminosity relation, unresolved binary, triple and quadruple systems, abundance and age spreads and Galactic structure,…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is an underlying distribution function which determines many important observables, from the number of ionizing photons in a population of some age and metallicity, through the creation rate of…
A new method for binning a set of $n$ data values into a set of m bins for the case where the bins are of different sizes is proposed. The method skips binning using a binary search across the bins all the time. It is proven the method…
Rank histograms are popular tools for assessing the reliability of meteorological ensemble forecast systems. A reliable forecast system leads to a uniform rank histogram, and deviations from uniformity can indicate miscalibrations. However,…
The existence of galaxy intrinsic clustering severely hampers the weak lensing reconstruction from cosmic magnification. In paper I \citep{Yang2011}, we proposed a minimal variance estimator to overcome this problem. By utilizing the…
Gravitational waves emitted by coalescing compact objects carry information about the spin of the individual bodies. However, with present detectors only the mass-weighted combination of the components of the spin along the orbital angular…
The local stellar mass density is observed to be significantly lower than the value obtained from integrating the cosmic star formation history (SFH), assuming that all the stars formed with a Salpeter initial mass function (IMF). Even…
The $L_{\infty}$ star discrepancy is a measure for the regularity of a finite set of points taken from $[0,1)^d$. Low discrepancy point sets are highly relevant for Quasi-Monte Carlo methods in numerical integration and several other…
In this letter we describe how we use stellar dynamics information to constrain the shape of the stellar IMF in a sample of 27 early-type galaxies from the CALIFA survey. We obtain dynamical and stellar mass-to-light ratios,…
An excess up-scattering mass bias on a weak lensing cluster mass estimate is a statistical bias that an observed weak lensing mass ($M_{\rm obs}$) of a cluster of galaxies is, in a statistical sense, larger than its true mass ($M_{\rm…
Recent results on the non-universality of the Initial Mass Function (IMF) have shown strong evidence of IMF variations with galaxy velocity dispersion, with a corresponding impact on other stellar population parameters, line indices and…