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JournalISSN: 0035-8711

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 

Oxford University Press
About: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society is an academic journal published by Oxford University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Galaxy & Physics. It has an ISSN identifier of 0035-8711. Over the lifetime, 72750 publications have been published receiving 3258770 citations. The journal is also known as: Royal Astronomical Society. Monthly Notices & MNRAS.
Topics: Galaxy, Physics, Stars, Star formation, Astrophysics


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the spectral evolution of stellar populations at ages between 100,000 yr and 20 Gyr at a resolution of 3 A across the whole wavelength range from 3200 to 9500 A for a wide range of metallicities.
Abstract: We present a new model for computing the spectral evolution of stellar populations at ages between 100,000 yr and 20 Gyr at a resolution of 3 A across the whole wavelength range from 3200 to 9500 A for a wide range of metallicities. These predictions are based on a newly available library of observed stellar spectra. We also compute the spectral evolution across a larger wavelength range, from 91 A to 160 micron, at lower resolution. The model incorporates recent progress in stellar evolution theory and an observationally motivated prescription for thermally-pulsing stars on the asymptotic giant branch. The latter is supported by observations of surface brightness fluctuations in nearby stellar populations. We show that this model reproduces well the observed optical and near-infrared colour-magnitude diagrams of Galactic star clusters of various ages and metallicities. Stochastic fluctuations in the numbers of stars in different evolutionary phases can account for the full range of observed integrated colours of star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds. The model reproduces in detail typical galaxy spectra from the Early Data Release (EDR) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We exemplify how this type of spectral fit can constrain physical parameters such as the star formation history, metallicity and dust content of galaxies. Our model is the first to enable accurate studies of absorption-line strengths in galaxies containing stars over the full range of ages. Using the highest-quality spectra of the SDSS EDR, we show that this model can reproduce simultaneously the observed strengths of those Lick indices that do not depend strongly on element abundance ratios [abridged].

10,384 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Pavel Kroupa1
TL;DR: In this paper, the uncertainty inherent in any observational estimate of the IMF is investigated by studying the scatter introduced by Poisson noise and the dynamical evolution of star clusters, and it is found that this apparent scatter reproduces quite well the observed scatter in power-law index determinations, thus defining the fundamental limit within which any true variation becomes undetectable.
Abstract: A universal initial mass function (IMF) is not intuitive, but so far no convincing evidence for a variable IMF exists. The detection of systematic variations of the IMF with star-forming conditions would be the Rosetta Stone for star formation. In this contribution an average or Galactic-field IMF is defined, stressing that there is evidence for a change in the power-law index at only two masses: near 0.5 M⊙ and near 0.08 M⊙. Using this supposed universal IMF, the uncertainty inherent in any observational estimate of the IMF is investigated by studying the scatter introduced by Poisson noise and the dynamical evolution of star clusters. It is found that this apparent scatter reproduces quite well the observed scatter in power-law index determinations, thus defining the fundamental limit within which any true variation becomes undetectable. The absence of evidence for a variable IMF means that any true variation of the IMF in well-studied populations must be smaller than this scatter. Determinations of the power-law indices α are subject to systematic errors arising mostly from unresolved binaries. The systematic bias is quantified here, with the result that the single-star IMFs for young star clusters are systematically steeper by Δα≈0.5 between 0.1 and 1 M⊙ than the Galactic-field IMF, which is populated by, on average, about 5-Gyr-old stars. The MFs in globular clusters appear to be, on average, systematically flatter than the Galactic-field IMF (Piotto & Zoccali; Paresce & De Marchi), and the recent detection of ancient white-dwarf candidates in the Galactic halo and the absence of associated low-mass stars (Ibata et al.; Mendez & Minniti) suggest a radically different IMF for this ancient population. Star formation in higher metallicity environments thus appears to produce relatively more low-mass stars. While still tentative, this is an interesting trend, being consistent with a systematic variation of the IMF as expected from theoretical arguments.

6,784 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: GADGET-2 as mentioned in this paper is a massively parallel tree-SPH code, capable of following a collisionless fluid with the N-body method, and an ideal gas by means of smoothed particle hydrodynamics.
Abstract: We discuss the cosmological simulation code GADGET-2, a new massively parallel TreeSPH code, capable of following a collisionless fluid with the N-body method, and an ideal gas by means of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). Our implementation of SPH manifestly conserves energy and entropy in regions free of dissipation, while allowing for fully adaptive smoothing lengths. Gravitational forces are computed with a hierarchical multipole expansion, which can optionally be applied in the form of a TreePM algorithm, where only short-range forces are computed with the ‘tree’ method while long-range forces are determined with Fourier techniques. Time integration is based on a quasi-symplectic scheme where long-range and short-range forces can be integrated with different time-steps. Individual and adaptive short-range time-steps may also be employed. The domain decomposition used in the parallelization algorithm is based on a space-filling curve, resulting in high flexibility and tree force errors that do not depend on the way the domains are cut. The code is efficient in terms of memory consumption and required communication bandwidth. It has been used to compute the first cosmological N-body simulation with more than 10 10 dark matter particles, reaching a homogeneous spatial dynamic range of 10 5 per dimension in a three-dimensional box. It has also been used to carry out very large cosmological SPH simulations that account for radiative cooling and star formation, reaching total particle numbers of more than 250 million. We present the algorithms used by the code and discuss their accuracy and performance using a number of test problems. GADGET-2 is publicly released to the research community. Ke yw ords: methods: numerical ‐ galaxies: interactions ‐ dark matter.

6,196 citations

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
20231,631
20224,820
20213,462
20204,258
20193,936
20183,777