Carsten Weidner, St.Andrews ()
"The galaxy-wide IMF - From star clusters to galaxies"
Abstract. Over the past years observations of young and populous star clustershave shown that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) appears to bean invariant featureless Salpeter power-law with an exponent alpha= 2.35 for stars more massive than a few Msol. A consensus hasalso emerged that most, if not all, stars form in stellar groups andstar clusters, and that the mass function of young star clusters canbe described as a power-law (the embedded cluster mass function, ECMF)with an exponent beta ~ 2. These two results imply that theintegrated galactic-field IMF (IGIMF) for early-type stars cannot be aSalpeter power-law, but that they must have a steeper exponent. Thishas important consequences for the distribution of stellar remnantsand for the chemo-dynamical and photometric evolution of galaxies.
Held in the AAO Conference room at 03:30 PM on Thursday, 09 September 2010
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