Comment on "An excess of massive stars in the local 30 Doradus starburst"

Abstract

Schneider et al. (Science, 2018) used an ad hoc statistical method in their calculation of the stellar initial mass function. Adopting an improved approach, we reanalyse their data and determine a power law exponent of $2.05_{-0.14}^{+0.13}$. Alternative assumptions regarding data set completeness and the star formation history model can shift the inferred exponent to $2.11_{-0.19}^{+0.17}$ and $2.15_{-0.13}^{+0.13}$, respectively.

published as a technical comment in Science

References in corpus (5)

• The NumPy array: a structure for efficient numerical computation
• An excess of massive stars in the local 30 Doradus starburst
• Inferring the eccentricity distribution
• The evolution of rotating very massive stars with LMC composition
• BONNSAI: correlated stellar observables in Bayesian methods

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