Chemical evolution of elliptical galaxies with a variable IMF. A publicly available code

Yan, Zhiqiang; Jerabkova, Tereza; Kroupa, Pavel; Vazdekis, Alejandro
Referencia bibliográfica

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Fecha de publicación:
9
2019
Número de autores
4
Número de autores del IAC
1
Número de citas
24
Número de citas referidas
23
Descripción
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.

http://https://github.com/Azeret/galIMF