2011/06/06 by Daniel R. Weisz, Weisz, Daniel R.
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1106.0949
6 Pages, 2 Figures. From the proceedings of the workshop `UP: Have Observations Revealed a Variable Upper End of the Stellar Initial Mass Function?', ASP Conference Series
arxiv created 2011/06/06 · openalex publication_date 2011/06/06 · arxiv updated 2015/03/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Using HST/ACS observations of resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies, I explore the constraints one can place on the field star IMF from star formation histories (SFHs) derived from synthetic color-magnitude diagram (CMD) fitting. In particular, I show how reasonable variations in the slope of the IMF, relative to a Salpeter slope, lead to only minor changes in the SFHs. This shows that CMD-SFH fitting parameter space has a broad minimum with respect to IMF variations and implies that CMD based SFHs can only provide weak explicit constraints on the stellar IMF. However, observations of resolved stellar populations in dwarf galaxies can be used to tandem with other methods to search for variations in the upper IMF.