Issue |
A&A
Volume 629, September 2019
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A93 | |
Number of page(s) | 16 | |
Section | Numerical methods and codes | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201936029 | |
Published online | 10 September 2019 |
Chemical evolution of elliptical galaxies with a variable IMF
A publicly available code⋆
1
Helmholtz-Institut für Strahlen- und Kernphysik (HISKP), Universität Bonn, Nussallee 14–16, 53115 Bonn, Germany
e-mail: yan@astro.uni-bonn.de, pkroupa@uni-bonn.de
2
Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Astronomical Institute, V Holešovičkách 2, 180 00 Praha 8, Czech Republic
3
European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Straße 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
e-mail: tereza.jerabkova@eso.org
4
Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, 38200 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
Received:
5
June
2019
Accepted:
23
July
2019
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.
Key words: galaxies: stellar content / galaxies: ISM / galaxies: abundances / galaxies: evolution / methods: numerical / galaxies: starburst
© ESO 2019
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