This is the astro-ph blog of the Theoretical Modelling of Cosmic Structures group (TMoX) at the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. We are an independent Max-Planck Research Group focusing on the various aspects in the formation and evolution of galaxies. Part of our focus is on the formation and evolution of early-type galaxies, super-massive black holes, the formation of the first structures in the universe and the enrichment history of the Universe. We are theoreticians using analytic modelling as well as numerical simulations in our work.

The CosmologyCake blog is dedicated to the discussion of research papers and current developments. We will regularly post interesting papers and comment on them. Feel free to leave your comments as well. We encourage authors of discussed papers to post replies if they wish to. Our aim is to provide a platform to discuss recent astro-ph papers within a wider audience. Please feel free to send papers you would like to be discussed to us at tmoxgroup@googlemail.com.

27 April 2011

Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): The star formation rate dependence of the stellar initial mass function

Link to paper on ADS here

Observations of galaxies found in the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey are presented and analyzed. It is argued that the observations suggest a high-mass IMF slope which evolves with star formation rate. For galaxies with larger star formation rates, the trend is for flatter IMF slope, meaning a larger portion of high mass stars than in less actively star forming galaxies. If correct, the implications of this finding are potentially far-reaching.