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Systematic variation of the stellar initial mass function in early-type galaxies

Michele Cappellari 1, * Richard M. Mcdermid 2 Katherine Alatalo 3 Leo Blitz 3 Maxime Bois 4 Frédéric Bournaud 5 M. Bureau 1 Alison F. Crocker 6 Roger L. Davies 1 Timothy A. Davis 1, 7 P. T. de Zeeuw 7, 8 Pierre-Alain Duc 5 Eric Emsellem 7, 9 Sadegh Khochfar 10 Davor Krajnović 7 Harald Kuntschner 7 Pierre-Yves Lablanche 7, 9 Raffaella Morganti 11, 12 Thorsten Naab 13 Tom Oosterloo 11, 12 Marc Sarzi 14 Nicholas Scott 15 Paolo Serra 11 Anne-Marie Weijmans 16 Lisa M. Young 17
* Corresponding author
1 Sub-department of Astrophysics [Oxford]
2 Gemini Observatory
3 Department of Astronomy [Berkeley]
4 LERMA (UMR_8112) - Laboratoire d'Etude du Rayonnement et de la Matière en Astrophysique
5 AIM (UMR_7158 / UMR_E_9005 / UM_112) - Astrophysique Interprétation Modélisation
6 Department of Astronomy [Amherst]
7 ESO - European Southern Observatory
8 Sterrewacht Leiden
9 CRAL - Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon
10 MPE - Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik
11 ASTRON - Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy
12 Kapteyn Astronomical Institute [Groningen]
13 MPA - Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik
14 Centre for Astrophysics Research [Hatfield]
15 Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing
16 Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics [Toronto]
17 Department of Physics [Socorro]
Abstract : Much of our knowledge of galaxies comes from analysing the radiation emitted by their stars, which depends on the present number of each type of star in the galaxy. The present number depends on the stellar initial mass function (IMF), which describes the distribution of stellar masses when the population formed, and knowledge of it is critical to almost every aspect of galaxy evolution. More than 50 years after the first IMF determination, no consensus has emerged on whether it is universal among different types of galaxies. Previous studies indicated that the IMF and the dark matter fraction in galaxy centres cannot both be universal, but they could not convincingly discriminate between the two possibilities. Only recently were indications found that massive elliptical galaxies may not have the same IMF as the Milky Way. Here we report a study of the two-dimensional stellar kinematics for the large representative ATLAS(3D) sample of nearby early-type galaxies spanning two orders of magnitude in stellar mass, using detailed dynamical models. We find a strong systematic variation in IMF in early-type galaxies as a function of their stellar mass-to-light ratios, producing differences of a factor of up to three in galactic stellar mass. This implies that a galaxy's IMF depends intimately on the galaxy's formation history
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Michele Cappellari, Richard M. Mcdermid, Katherine Alatalo, Leo Blitz, Maxime Bois, et al.. Systematic variation of the stellar initial mass function in early-type galaxies. Nature, Nature Publishing Group, 2012, 484 (7395), pp.485-488. ⟨10.1038/nature10972⟩. ⟨cea-00881332⟩

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