Time Evolution of the Stellar Mass Function of Galactic Clusters

Details Time Evolution of the Stellar Mass Function of Galactic Clusters Time Evolution of the Stellar Mass Function of Galactic Clusters

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21344206d&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #442.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.320

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We show that we can obtain a good fit to the present day stellar mass function of a large sample of young and old Galactic clusters with a tapered Salpeter power law distribution function with an exponential truncation of the form dN/dm ∝ mα [1-exp(-m/mc)β]. The average value of the power-law index α is very close to Salpeter (-2.3), whereas the characteristic mass mc is in the range 0.1 - 0.8 Msun. The latter does not seem to vary in a systematic way with the present cluster parameters such as metal abundance and central concentration, but does show a rough correlation with age in the sense that it increases with age. We attribute this trend to the combination of two effects: 1. the onset of mass segregation following early dynamical interactions in the loose cluster cores; 2. the incomplete sampling of the mass function in the outskirts of the cluster. Differences between globular and younger clusters may depend on the initial environment of star formation, which in turn affects their total mass. The existence of a few clusters like Taurus that defy the trend between age and mc may indicate that the IMF is not universal.

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