Oral Presentation

Striking resemblance between IMF and the mass spectrum of sub-pc clumps

Author(s): Yue Cao & Keping Qiu

Presenter: Yue Cao (Nanjing University)

IMF is one of the most fundamental concepts in astrophysics, yet its exact origin is still unclear. Stars form in molecular clouds that contain clumps and cores—dense fluctuations on sub-pc and 0.1–0.01 pc scales, respectively. It has been found that core mass function resembles IMF and that cloud mass function does not. Thus the critical spatial scale where this resemblance emerges becomes crucial for understanding the IMF origin. We present that the clump mass function sampled in the giant molecular cloud Cygnus X strikingly resembles IMF, owing to our unprecedentedly large (near 10^4) catalog sampled in an area of 18,000 pc^2. This provides strong evidence that IMF originates from clumps in molecular clouds on up to sub-pc scales.