{"id":415085,"date":"2017-12-11T07:05:44","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T11:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?guid=dc14864eb86d11769d61622d88b39e66"},"modified":"2017-12-11T07:05:44","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T11:05:44","slug":"the-initial-mass-function","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=415085","title":{"rendered":"The initial mass function"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The gas and dust in giant molecular clouds gradually come together under the influence of gravity to form stars. Precisely how this occurs, however, is incompletely understood. The mass of a star, for example, is by far the most important factor constraining its future evolution, but astronomers do not clearly understand what determines the exact mass of a newly forming star. One aspect of this problem is simply knowing how many stars of each size there are, that is, knowing the distribution of stellar masses in a large cluster of stars. The initial mass function (IMF) describes this distribution, and is currently based on an average from observations of stars in our Milky Way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The gas and dust in giant molecular clouds gradually come together under the influence of gravity to form stars. Precisely how this occurs, however, is incompletely understood. The mass of a star, for example, is by far the most important factor constr&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-415085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=415085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":415086,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415085\/revisions\/415086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=415085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=415085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=415085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}