On the Constancy of the Characteristic Mass of Young Stars

The characteristic mass Mc in the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is about constant for most star-forming regions. Numerical simulations consistently show a proportionality between Mc and the thermal Jeans mass MJ at the time of cloud fragmentation, but no models have explained how it can be the same in diverse conditions. Here we show that MJ depends weakly on density, temperature, metallicity, and radiation field in three environments: …