The subtleties of measuring a Core Mass Function

The paper by Genaro Suárez et al. appeared in the The Astrophysical Journal! Link here.

Genaro spent a few months in Morelia working with the ALMA data of G33.92 of Baobab Liu's project. He had just finished a PhD thesis with Carlos Román-Zúñiga on stellar astrophysics. A good component of his thesis was to measure the stellar IMF in nearby associations, so this project was a good fit in spite of the change of wavelength.

The result was a very interesting paper in which several of us learned plenty on the techniques and subtleties of measuring a Core Mass Function, including dealing properly with incompleteness, biases due to a limited sample size, and other effects.

In the end, the measured CMF slope was alpha = -1.11 +0.12-0.11, which is marginally consistent with the standard Salpeter slope for the stellar IMF alpha_Salp = -1.35, especially if the latter is considered to have measurement errors too.

links

social