Wednesday, at Geneva.
1211.6105
The panchromatic Hubble Andromeda treasury IV. A probabilistic approach to inferring the high mass stellar initial mass function and other power-law functions
Weisz, .. Hogg, .. Rix, .. Dalcanton, .. Bell, .. et al
Probabilistic approach for inferring the parameters of the present day power-law stellar mass function (MF) of a resolved young star cluster. This technique (a) fully exploits the information content of a given dataset; (b) accounts for observational uncertainties in a straightforward way; (c) assigns meaningful uncertainties to the inferred parameters; (d) avoids the pitfalls associated with binning data; and (e) is applicable to virtually any resolved young cluster. Find: ~3/4 of quoted literature uncertainties are smaller than the theoretical lower limit. Verify that it is impossible for a power-law MF to obtain meaningful constraints on the upper mass limit of the IMF. Avoiding substantial biases in the MF slope requires: (1) including the MF as prior when deriving individual stellar mass estimates; (2) modeling the uncertainties in the individual stellar masses; and (3) fully characterizing and then explicitly modeling the completeness for stars of a given mass.
1211.6105
The panchromatic Hubble Andromeda treasury IV. A probabilistic approach to inferring the high mass stellar initial mass function and other power-law functions
Weisz, .. Hogg, .. Rix, .. Dalcanton, .. Bell, .. et al
Probabilistic approach for inferring the parameters of the present day power-law stellar mass function (MF) of a resolved young star cluster. This technique (a) fully exploits the information content of a given dataset; (b) accounts for observational uncertainties in a straightforward way; (c) assigns meaningful uncertainties to the inferred parameters; (d) avoids the pitfalls associated with binning data; and (e) is applicable to virtually any resolved young cluster. Find: ~3/4 of quoted literature uncertainties are smaller than the theoretical lower limit. Verify that it is impossible for a power-law MF to obtain meaningful constraints on the upper mass limit of the IMF. Avoiding substantial biases in the MF slope requires: (1) including the MF as prior when deriving individual stellar mass estimates; (2) modeling the uncertainties in the individual stellar masses; and (3) fully characterizing and then explicitly modeling the completeness for stars of a given mass.
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