Physics
Scientific paper
May 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aipc.1111..129w&link_type=abstract
PROBING STELLAR POPULATIONS OUT TO THE DISTANT UNIVERSE: CEFALU 2008, Proceedings of the International Conference. AIP Conferen
Physics
Galaxy Clusters, Galactic Center, Bar, Circumnuclear Matter, And Bulge, Star Formation
Scientific paper
Over the past years observations of young and populous star clusters have shown that the stellar IMF appears to be an invariant featureless Salpeter power-law with an exponent α = 2.35 for stars more massive than a few Msolar. A consensus has also emerged that most, if not all, stars form in stellar groups and star clusters, and that the mass function of young star clusters in the solar-neighbourhood and in interacting galaxies can be described, over the mass range of a few 10Msolar to 107Msolar, as a power-law with an exponent β~2. Under the assumption of a relation between the most-massive star in a cluster and the cluster mass these two results imply that integrated galactic-field IMFs for early-type stars cannot be a Salpeter power-law, but that they must have a steeper exponent [1]. Furthermore, the empirical correlation between galactic star-formation rate (SFR) and the mass of the most massive cluster that forms in a galaxy [2] implies that dwarf galaxies that have low average star-formation rates will have substantially different integrated IMFs than massive galaxies such as our Milky Way [3]. This has important consequences for the distribution of stellar remnants and for the chemo-dynamical and photometric evolution of galaxies. These results suggest that dwarf galaxies ought to show large variations in their integrated field-star IMFs and consequently in their chemical enrichment, while massive galaxies tend to have the same integrated field IMFs with a corresponding smaller inter-galactic scatter in chemical abundances.
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