Hubble observations of a nearby galaxy show evidence for a universal initial mass function.
Van Dokkum & Conroy examane the variation of the stellar initial mass function by observing the integrated light from early-type galaxies.
You might think that stars with an approximately continuous distribution of masses would lead to remnants with an approximately continuous distribution masses. But you’d be wrong.
I just vacuumed my apartment and asked the question, ‘how does so much dust accumulate in one week?’ These authors ask a more scientifically interesting question: how can galaxies accumulate more than 100 million solar masses of dust in just a few hundred million years?