Heavy element abundances and massive star formation

Details Heavy element abundances and massive star formation Heavy element abundances and massive star formation

Jan 1993

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1993egte.conf....5w&link_type=abstract

In NASA. Ames Research Center, The Evolution of Galaxies and Their Environment p 5-6 (SEE N93-26706 10-90)

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Abundance, Heavy Elements, Interstellar Matter, Massive Stars, Solar Neighborhood, Spiral Galaxies, Star Formation, Starburst Galaxies, Stellar Evolution, Stellar Mass, Supernovae, Cosmic Gases, Metallicity, Nuclear Fusion, Oxygen

Scientific paper

The determination of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) remains a great challenge in astronomy. In the solar neighborhood, the IMF is reasonable well determined for stellar masses from about 0.1 to 60 solar mass. However, outside the solar neighborhood, the IMF is poorly known. Among those frequently discussed arguments favoring a different IMF outside the solar neighborhood are the estimated time to consume the remaining gas in spiral galaxies, and the high rate of forming massive stars in starburst galaxies. An interesting question then is whether there may be an independent way of testing possible variations in the IMF. Indeed, the heavy elements in the interstellar medium are mostly synthesized in massive stars, so increasing, or decreasing, the fraction of massive stars naturally leads to a variation in the heavy element yield, and thus, the metallicity. The observed abundance should severely constrain any deviations of the IMF from the locally determined IMF. We focus on element oxygen, which is the most abundant heavy element in the interstellar medium. Oxygen is ejected only by massive stars that can become Type 1 supernovae, and the oxygen abundance is, therefore, a sensitive function of the fraction of massive stars in the IMF. Adopting oxygen enables us to avoid uncertainties in Type 1 supernovae. We use the nucleosynthesis results to calculate the oxygen yield for given IMF. We then calculate the oxygen abundance in the interstellar medium assuming instantaneous recycling of oxygen.

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