Chemical evolution of elliptical galaxies with a variable IMF

Growing evidence in recent years suggests a systematic variation of the stellar initial mass function (IMF), being top-heavy for starburst galaxies and possibly bottom-heavy for massive ellipticals. Galaxy chemical evolution simulations adopting an invariant canonical IMF face difficulty in simultan...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin) 2019-09, Vol.629
Main Authors: Yan, Zhiqiang, Jerabkova, Tereza, Kroupa, Pavel, Vazdekis, Alejandro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Chemical evolution
Elliptical galaxies
Galactic evolution
galaxies: abundances
galaxies: evolution
galaxies: ISM
galaxies: starburst
galaxies: stellar content
Initial mass function
Invariants
Metallicity
methods: numerical
Space telescopes
Star & galaxy formation
Star formation rate
Starburst galaxies
Stars & galaxies
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Summary:Growing evidence in recent years suggests a systematic variation of the stellar initial mass function (IMF), being top-heavy for starburst galaxies and possibly bottom-heavy for massive ellipticals. Galaxy chemical evolution simulations adopting an invariant canonical IMF face difficulty in simultaneously reproducing the metallicity and α-enhancement of the massive elliptical galaxies. Applying a variable IMF that changes with time is a promising solution, however, it is non-trivial to couple a variable IMF theory with the existing galaxy evolution codes. Here we present the first open source simulation code which recalculates the galaxy-wide IMF at each time step according to the integrated galactic IMF (IGIMF) theory where the galaxy-wide IMF depends on the galactic star formation rate and metallicity. The resulting galaxy-wide IMF and metal abundance evolve with time. With this pilot work, we explore the effect of the IGIMF theory on galaxy chemical evolution in comparison with an invariant IMF.
ISSN:0004-6361
1432-0746
DOI:10.1051/0004-6361/201936029