Training Log Archive: AliC

Should anyone be perusing Nature today, this article was just published by my group (less technical overview here). It's actually really cool stuff- for almost ever, it's been assumed that stars form at masses as determined by an "initial mass function". This is simply a distribution function describing the probability that a star forms at a certain mass. It's probably a log-normal function (woo Central Limit Theorem), with a cutoff at both high and low masses. Until this work, all observational signs have pointed to the distribution being fairly constant, in dense and less dense star-forming regions, in different types of galaxies, etc.

But my group's work shows that the amount of mass in big (predominantly) old galaxies is too large for the amount of light that their stars produce. So there must be more low-mass stars, which inherently have lower luminosity-to-mass ratios. Lots more, at least times 3. So theorists, please go revise your simulations, the universe is different than we thought....

C • must be more low mass stars 9

Core, although something in my knee started hurting doing SJJs so I quite them partway through...

And hammies! Been too long...