The stellar initial mass function and the stellar lifetimes are basic ingredients of chemical evolution models, for which different recipes can be found in the literature. In this paper, we quantify the effects on chemical evolution studies of the uncertainties in these two parameters. We concentrate on chemical evolution models for the Milky Way, because of the large number of good observation...

We discuss the method, and potential systematic effects therein, used for measuring the mass of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. We restrict our discussion to the method that relies on the validity of Kepler’s laws; we refer to this method as the dynamical method. We briefly discuss the implications of the mass distribution of stellar-mass black holes and provide an outlook for futur...

There is still much debate surrounding how the most massive, central galaxies in the local universe have assembled their stellar mass, especially the relative roles of in-situ growth versus later accretion via mergers. In this paper, we set firmer constraints on the evolutionary pathways of the most massive central galaxies by making use of empirical estimates on their abundances and stellar ag...

We present spectroscopic metallicities of individual stars in seven gas-rich dwarf irregular galaxies (dIrrs), and we show that dIrrs obey the same mass–metallicity relation as the dwarf spheroidal (dSph) satellites of both the Milky Way and M31: Z∗ ∝ M 0.30±0.02 ∗ . The uniformity of the relation is in contradiction to previous estimates of metallicity based on photometry. This relationship is...

Using a large galaxy group catalogue constructed from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 4 (SDSS DR4) with an adaptive halo-based group finder, we investigate the luminosity and stellar mass functions for different populations of galaxies (central versus satellite; red versus blue; and galaxies in groups of different masses) and for groups themselves. The conditional stellar mass functio...

Executive Summary The stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) is remarkably consistent over a host of environments in the Galactic neighborhood. The physical processes responsible for producing a seemingly invariant IMF have long been the subject of theoretical investigation. Recently, a potential link has been made between the mass distribution of clumps in nearby molecular clouds and the stellar ...

Abstract In this empirical work, we aim to quantify the systematic uncertainties in stellar-mass ( M ⋆ ) estimates made from spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting through stellar population synthesis (SPS) for galaxies local Universe by using dynamical mass dyn estimator as an SED-independent check on mass. We first construct a statistical model of high-dimensional space galaxy properties;...