Bibcode
Pflamm-Altenburg, J.; Weidner, C.; Kroupa, P.
Referencia bibliográfica
UP2010: Have Observations Revealed a Variable Upper End of the Initial Mass Function? ASP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 440. Proceedings of a Conference held at Sedona, Arizona, USA 20-25 June 2010 Edited by Marie Treyer, Ted K.Wyder, James D. Neill, Mark Seibert, Janice C. Lee. San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2011., p.269
Fecha de publicación:
6
2011
Número de citas
5
Número de citas referidas
3
Descripción
The functional form of the galaxy-wide stellar initial mass function is
of fundamental importance for understanding galaxies. So far this
stellar initial mass function (IMF) has been assumed to be identical to
the IMF observed directly in star clusters. But because stars form
predominantly in embedded groups rather than uniformly distributed over
the whole galaxy, the galaxy-wide IMF needs to be calculated by adding
all IMFs of all embedded groups. This integrated galactic stellar
initial mass function (IGIMF) is steeper than the canonical IMF and
steepens with decreasing star formation rate (SFR), leading to
fundamental new insights and understanding of star forming properties of
galaxies. This contribution reviews the existing applications of the
IGIMF theory to galactic astrophysics, while the parallel contribution
by Weidner, Pflamm-Altenburg & Kroupa (this volume) introduces the
IGIMF theory.