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arXiv · 1011.3814

Top-heavy integrated galactic stellar initial mass functions (IGIMFs) in starbursts

Carsten Weidner·Pavel Kroupa·Jan Pflamm-Altenburg
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Abstract

Star formation rates (SFR) larger than 1000 Msun/ yr are observed in extreme star bursts. This leads to the formation of star clusters with masses > 10^6 Msun in which crowding of the pre-stellar cores may lead to a change of the stellar initial mass function (IMF). Indeed, the large mass-to-light ratios of ultra-compact dwarf galaxies and recent results on globular clusters suggest the IMF to become top-heavy with increasing star-forming density. We explore the implications of top-heavy IMFs in these very massive and compact systems for the integrated galactic initial mass function (IGIMF), which is the galaxy-wide IMF, in dependence of the star-formation rate of galaxies. The resulting IGIMFs can have slopes, alpha_3, for stars more massive than about 1 Msun between 1.5 and the Salpeter slope of 2.3 for an embedded cluster mass function (ECMF) slope (beta) of 2.0, but only if the ECMF has no low-mass clusters in galaxies with major starbursts. Alternatively, beta would have to decrease with increasing SFR >10 Msun/ yr such that galaxies with major starbursts have a top-heavy ECMF. The resulting IGIMFs are within the range of observationally deduced IMF variations with redshift.

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Carsten Weidner, Pavel Kroupa, Jan Pflamm-Altenburg. 2010-11-16. Top-heavy integrated galactic stellar initial mass functions (IGIMFs) in starbursts. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17959.x

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