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| EPoS Contribution |
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The Milky Way stellar clusters are not born equal
Sami Dib NBI, STARPLAN, Copenhagen, DK | |
| I will present a novel method to infer the distributions of the parameters that describe the IMF (slopes at the low and high mass ends, and characteristic mass) for the population of young clusters in the Milky Way. The novelty and power of the method is based on the fact that it relies only on the statistics of the high mass content of the Milky Way clusters, but is able to yield information on the parameters distributions of the IMF over the entire mass range. This is achieved by appropriately comparing the statistics of massive stars in a recent catalog of Milky Way clusters (the MWSC catalog) with a very large library of synthetic clusters built with various initial cluster mass functions, and including corrections for the binary population, stellar evolution, completeness, and estimates for the effects of dynamical evolution. We find that the distributions of the IMF parameters required to fit the fractions of single O stars in clusters are sufficiently broad such as to invalidate the concept of a universal IMF. The method also allows us to put strong constraints on the shape of the initial cluster mass function. Furthermore, our results seem to rule out the existence of a cluster mass-maximum stellar mass relation. These broad distributions of the IMF parameters very likely reflect the existence of equally broad distributions for the initial conditions under which these clusters have formed in porto-cluster clumps. | |
| Collaborators: S. Schmeja, ARI/ZAH/U Hannover, DE S. Hony, ITA/ZAH, DE A. Nordlund, NBI/STARPLAN, DK |
Key publication
Suggested Session: Cluster Formation |