All Figures

Figure 1: Dust extinction map of the Pipe nebula molecular complex from Lombardi et al. (2006). This map was constructed from near-infrared observations of about 4 million stars in the background of the complex. Approximately 160 individual cores are identified within the cloud and are marked by an open circle proportional to the core radius. Most of these cores appear as distinct, well separated entities.

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In the text

Figure 2: Mass function of dense molecular cores plotted as filled circles with error bars. The grey line is the stellar IMF for the Trapezium cluster (Muench et al. 2002). The dashed grey line represents the stellar IMF in binned form matching the resolution of the data and shifted to higher masses by about a factor of 4. The dense core mass function is similar in shape to the stellar IMF function, apart from a uniform star formation efficiency factor.

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In the text

Figure 3: Probability density function of core masses (black) for the background subtracted sample. The grey region indicates sample incompleteness while the two thin dashed line indicates the 90% confidence limits. The core mass distribution seems to be characterized by two power-laws and a well defined break point at around 2 . Also plotted are the field star IMFs of Kroupa (2001) (solid grey) and Chabrier (2003) (dotted grey), and the Muench et al. (2002) (dashed grey) IMF all scaled up by a factor of 3 in mass.

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In the text