A Preferential Attachment Model for the Stellar Initial Mass Function

Abstract

Accurate specification of a likelihood function is becoming increasingly difficult in many inference problems in astronomy. As sample sizes resulting from astronomical surveys continue to grow, deficiencies in the likelihood function lead to larger biases in key parameter estimates. These deficiencies result from the oversimplification of the physical processes that generated the data, and from the failure to account for observational limitations. Unfortunately, realistic models often do not yield an analytical form for the likelihood. The estimation of a stellar initial mass function (IMF) is an important example. The stellar IMF is the mass distribution of stars initially formed in a given cluster of stars, a population which is not directly observable due to stellar evolution and other disruptions and observational limitations of the cluster. There are several difficulties with specifying a likelihood in this setting since the physical processes and observational challenges result in measurable masses that cannot legitimately be considered independent draws from an IMF. This work improves inference of the IMF by using an approximate Bayesian computation approach that both accounts for observational and astrophysical effects and incorporates a physically-motivated model for star cluster formation. The methodology is illustrated via a simulation study, demonstrating that the proposed approach can recover the true posterior in realistic situations, and applied to observations from astrophysical simulation data.

References in corpus (49)

• Emergence of scaling in random networks
• Galactic Stellar and Substellar Initial Mass Function
• On the variation of the Initial Mass Function
• Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
• Clustering and preferential attachment in growing networks
• The mass distribution and gravitational potential of the Milky Way
• A Universal Stellar Initial Mass Function? A Critical Look at Variations
• The Galactic disk mass function: reconciliation of the HST and nearby determinations
• Adaptive approximate Bayesian computation
• Measuring preferential attachment for evolving networks
• Stellar, brown dwarf and multiple star properties from a radiation hydrodynamical simulation of star cluster formation
• A Substantial Population of Low Mass Stars in Luminous Elliptical Galaxies
• Non-linear regression models for Approximate Bayesian Computation
• The initial mass function of early-type galaxies
• A Comparative Review of Dimension Reduction Methods in Approximate Bayesian Computation
• The initial mass function : from Salpeter 1955 to 2005
• The stellar and sub-stellar IMF of simple and composite populations
• The Stellar Initial Mass Function of Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxies: Evidence for IMF Variations with Galactic Environment
• The stellar IMF determined in early-type galaxies from a non-degenerate set of optical line indices
• A Multi-color Optical Survey of the Orion Nebula Cluster. II. the H-R diagram
• Constraining the thick disc formation scenario of the Milky Way
• The Initial Mass Function of the Orion Nebula Cluster across the H-burning limit
• The Jeans mass and the origin of the knee in the IMF
• Lensing substructure quantification in RXJ1131-1231: A 2 keV lower bound on dark matter thermal relic mass
• Approximate Bayesian Computation for Astronomical Model Analysis: A Case Study in Galaxy Demographics and Morphological Transformation at High Redshift
• The statistical properties of stars and their dependence on metallicity: the effects of opacity
• Likelihood-Free Cosmological Inference with Type Ia Supernovae: Approximate Bayesian Computation for a Complete Treatment of Uncertainty
• The Origin and Universality of the Stellar Initial Mass Function
• cosmoabc: Likelihood-free inference via Population Monte Carlo Approximate Bayesian Computation
• A Tale of Three Cities: OmegaCAM discovers multiple sequences in the color-magnitude diagram of the Orion Nebula Cluster
• The Starburst Cluster Westerlund 1: The Initial Mass Function and Mass Segregation
• Hierarchical fragmentation in the Perseus molecular cloud: From the cloud scale to protostellar objects
• Modeling the structure and evolution of discussion cascades
• The IMF of stellar clusters: effects of accretion and feedback
• The Deaths of Very Massive Stars
• Massive stars reveal variations of the stellar initial mass function in the Milky Way stellar clusters
• Approximate Bayesian Computation in Large Scale Structure: constraining the galaxy-halo connection
• Cosmological constraints with weak lensing peak counts and second-order statistics in a large-field survey
• The Magellanic Bridge cluster NGC 796: Deep optical AO imaging reveals the stellar content and initial mass function of a massive open cluster
• Star Formation Quenching Timescale of Central Galaxies in a Hierarchical Universe
• The Intrinsic Neptune Trojan Orbit Distribution: Implications for the Primordial Disk and Planet Migration
• The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury IV. A Probabilistic Approach to Inferring the High Mass Stellar Initial Mass Function and Other Power-law Functions
• The low-mass population in the young cluster Stock 8: Stellar properties and Initial Mass Function
• Salpeter normalization of the Stellar Initial Mass Function for massive galaxies at z~1
• The redshift distribution of cosmological samples: a forward modeling approach
• Exploring the IMF of star clusters: a joint SLUG and LEGUS effort
• Preferential Attachment in Online Networks: Measurement and Explanations
• Preferential Attachment and Vertex Arrival Times
• Are Extreme Value Estimation Methods Useful for Network Data?

Cited by in corpus (3)

• 21st Century Statistical and Computational Challenges in Astrophysics
• Accurate X-ray Timing in the Presence of Systematic Biases With Simulation-Based Inference
• Catalog-free modeling of galaxy types in deep images: Massive dimensional reduction with neural networks