Bibcode
Paust, Nathaniel; Reid, I. N.; Aparicio, A.; King, I.; Piotto, G.
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #442.14; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.321
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1
2009
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
We present new global mass functions for a large number of clusters from
the ACS Survey of Galactic Globular Clusters and find that the majority
of the mass functions follow power-law behavior from the main sequence
turnoff (at approximately 0.7 solar masses) down to our completeness
limit (at approximately 0.3 solar masses). Comparing the mass function
slopes with parameters from the Harris catalog of globular clusters,
significant correlations between the mass function slope and several
other cluster parameters. These correlations suggest that a majority of
the variation in the mass function slope is due to cluster evolution
through interactions with the Galaxy. This opens the door to the
possibility of a universal initial mass function for the clusters
studied, although significant dynamical modeling is required to confirm
this conclusion.