What does a universal IMF imply about star formation?

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a universal initial mass function (IMF) can arise from diverse star formation processes due to the similar shapes of core, system, and stellar mass distributions, highlighting the complexity of linking observed IMFs to formation mechanisms.

Contribution

It shows that different star formation modes can produce the same IMF, emphasizing the role of distribution shapes and challenging direct inferences about formation processes.

Findings

Same IMF from different core and system mass functions

Mass ratio distributions within systems vary widely

Relationships between mass functions are complex

Abstract

We show that the same initial mass function (IMF) can result from very different modes of star formation from very similar underlying core and/or system mass functions. In particular, we show that the canonical IMF can be recovered from very similar system mass functions, but with very different mass ratio distributions within those systems. This is a consequence of the basically log-normal shapes of all of the distributions. We also show that the relationships between the shapes of the core, system, and stellar mass functions may not be trivial. Therefore, different star formation in different regions could still result in the same IMF.