The systematically varying stellar IMF

Abstract

Some ultra-compact dwarf galaxies have large dynamical mass to light (M/L) ratios and also appear to contain an overabundance of LMXB sources, and some Milky Way globular clusters have a low concentration and appear to have a deficit of low-mass stars. These observations can be explained if the stellar IMF becomes increasingly top-heavy with decreasing metallicity and increasing gas density of the forming object. The thus constrained stellar IMF then accounts for the observed trend of metallicity and M/L ratio found amongst M31 globular star clusters. It also accounts for the overall shift of the observationally deduced galaxy-wide IMF from top-light to top-heavy with increasing star formation rate amongst galaxies. If the IMF varies similarly to deduced here, then extremely young very massive star-burst clusters observed at a high redshift would appear quasar-like (Jerabkova et al. 2017) .

Appearing in the proceedings of IAUS351 on Star Clusters: From the Milky Way to the Early Universe, held in Bologna, May 27th-31st

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Dynamical Evolution of Multiple-Population Globular Clusters
• Radial variation of the stellar mass functions in the globular clusters M15 and M30: clues of a non-standard IMF?
• Stellar Initial Mass Function over a range of redshifts
• Compact object populations over cosmic time I. BOSSA: a Binary Object environment-Sensitive Sampling Algorithm