Cake Talk by Ethan Garcia
Understanding star-formation conditions and its associated Initial Mass Function (IMF) is critical to deriving galactic properties and their evolution in the universe. Although the IMF has traditionally been inconclusive beyond the local universe, recent research at DAWN parameterized the IMF in the EAZY photometric fitting code. Here, we employ the same IMF parameterization in LePhare, a fundamentally different method of fitting photometry. Results from fitting thousands of galaxies in extensive catalogs suggest systematic variations in the IMF over time that are similarly consistent with EAZY, further verifying that most galaxies exhibit top-heavier stellar populations than in the Milky Way. In addition, LePhare extracts relationships of the variable IMF with properties of star-forming and quenched populations, yielding a more complete and accurate picture of galactic evolution.