2026/07/28 by Theo Richardson, Adam Ginsburg, Sergey Koposov
#astro-ph.IM #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.HE #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-3881/ae8aef
Mass functions are used in all areas of astrophysics. The stellar initial mass function (IMF), in particular, plays a central role in modeling stellar populations in galaxies. However, few dedicated tools for working directly with the IMF and its precursor functions are widely available. We present the imf package, a Python library integrated into the wider scientific Python ecosystem that implements common and variant forms of mass functions, especially the IMF and its pre- and protostellar equivalents, as probability distribution functions based on SciPy's statistics architecture. This package enables the performance of operations such as sampling and integration on a wide array of highly customizable mass functions. imf is publicly available on the Python package index pypi under the project name initialmassfunction.