Massive stars: their birth sites and distribution

The stellar IMF has been found to be an invariant Salpeter power-law (alpha=2.35) above about 1 M-circle dot, but at the same time a massive star typically has more than one companion. This constrains the possible formation scenarios of massive stars, but also implies that the true, binary-star corrected stellar IMF could be significantly steeper than Salpeter, alpha>2.7. A significant fraction of all OB stars are found relatively far from potential birth sites which is most probably a result of dynamical ejections from cores of binary-rich star clusters. Such cores form rapidly due to dynamical mass segregation, or they are primordial. Probably all OB stars thus form in stellar clusters together with low-mass stars, and they have a rather devastating effect on the embedded cluster by rapidly driving out the remaining gas leaving expanding OB associations and bound star clusters. The distributed population of OB stars has a measured IMF with alphaapproximate to4, which however, does not necessarily constitute a different physical mode for isolated star formation. A steep field-star IMF is obtained naturally because stars form in clusters which are distributed according to a power-law cluster mass function. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.