Implications of a Temperature-dependent Initial Mass Function. II. An Updated View of the Star-forming Main Sequence
Abstract
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is predicted to depend upon the temperature of gas in star-forming molecular clouds. The introduction of an additional parameter, TIMF, into photometric template fitting, allows galaxies to be fit with a range of IMFs. Three surprising new features appear: (1) most star-forming galaxies are best fit with a bottom-lighter IMF than the Milky Way; (2) most star-forming galaxies at fixed redshift are fit with a very similar IMF; and (3) the most-massive star-forming galaxies at fixed redshift instead exhibit a less bottom-light IMF, similar to that measured in quiescent galaxies. Additionally, since stellar masses and star formation rates both depend on the IMF, these results slightly modify the resulting relationship, while yielding similar qualitative characteristics to previous studies.
Additional Information
© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2021 September 21; revised 2022 March 11; accepted 2022 March 28; published 2022 May 25. The authors would like to thank Vasily Kokorev and Darach Watson for useful discussions. C.L.S. is supported by ERC grant 648179 "ConTExt." B.M. is supported by the Tombrello Fellowship. A.L. is supported by the Selove Prize. The Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN) is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation under grant No. 140. The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation.Attached Files
Published - Steinhardt_2022_ApJ_931_58.pdf
Accepted Version - 2205.14161.pdf
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- Implications of a Temperature Dependent IMF II: An Updated View of the Star-Forming Main Sequence
- Eprint ID
- 115294
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20220629-450215700
- 648179
- European Research Council (ERC)
- Tombrello Fellowship
- Selove Prize
- 140
- Danish National Research Foundation
- Simons Foundation
- Created
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2022-06-30Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-06-30Created from EPrint's last_modified field