Mass distributions of stars and cores in young groups and clusters

TL;DR

This study examines how the observed core mass function in young stellar groups is affected by projection effects and blending, revealing that in crowded environments, the observed core masses do not reliably indicate the future stellar mass distribution.

Contribution

It introduces a method to simulate initial core maps from stellar data and analyzes how blending impacts the derived core mass function in young clusters.

Findings

Derived core counts are underestimated in crowded groups.

Mass peaks of derived CMFs are significantly higher than initial CMFs in dense environments.

Projection blending causes the observed core mass function to misrepresent the true protostellar mass distribution.

Abstract

We investigate the relation of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) and the dense core mass function (CMF), using stellar masses and positions in 14 well-studied young groups. Initial column density maps are computed by replacing each star with a model initial core having the same star formation efficiency (SFE). For each group the SFE, core model, and observational resolution are varied to produce a realistic range of initial maps. A clumpfinding algorithm parses each initial map into derived cores, derived core masses, and a derived CMF. The main result is that projected blending of initial cores causes derived cores to be too few and too massive. The number of derived cores is fewer than the number of initial cores by a mean factor 1.4 in sparse groups and 5 in crowded groups. The mass at the peak of the derived CMF exceeds the mass at the peak of the initial CMF by a mean factor 1.0 in sparse groups and 12.1 in crowded groups. These results imply that in crowded young groups and clusters, the mass distribution of observed cores may not reliably predict the mass distribution of protostars which will form in those cores.