Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 735, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/735/1/49
Keywords
ISM: clouds; radiative transfer; stars: formation; stars: luminosity function; mass function turbulence
Categories
Funding
- NSF [0847477, AST-0807739, CAREER-0955300, AST-0908553]
- France-Berkeley fund
- Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics
- Center for Origin, Dynamics and Evolution of Planets
- DOE [DE-FC02-06ER41453-03]
- Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship
- US Department of Energy at LLNL [DE-AC52-07NA]
- NASA [NNX09AK31G]
- NSF through Teragrid resources
- ATFP
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [847477] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
- Division Of Astronomical Sciences [905801] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Astronomical Sciences [847477] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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The stellar initial mass function (IMF), along with the star formation rate, is one of the fundamental properties that any theory of star formation must explain. An interesting feature of the IMF is that it appears to be remarkably universal across a wide range of environments. Particularly, there appears to be little variation in either the characteristic mass of the IMF or its high-mass tail between clusters with different metallicities. Previous attempts to understand this apparent independence of metallicity have not accounted for radiation feedback from high-mass protostars, which can dominate the energy balance of the gas in star-forming regions. We extend this work, showing that the fragmentation of molecular gas should depend only weakly on the amount of dust present, even when the primary heating source is radiation from massive protostars. First, we report a series of core collapse simulations using the ORION AMR code that systematically vary the dust opacity and show explicitly that this has little effect on the temperature or fragmentation of the gas. Then, we provide an analytic argument for why the IMF varies so little in observed star clusters, even as the metallicity varies by a factor of 100.
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