An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

The hypothesis whereby there exists a universal parent → distribution function which describes the stellar → initial mass function in individual star forming events. A consensus appears to have emerged in the community that the stellar IMF is largely invariant for star formation conditions as are found throughout the Local Group of galaxies at the present time. For details and discussion see Pavel Kroupa (2012), Recent advances on IMF research, arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/1210.1211, and references therein.

See also: → universality; → initial mass function.