The IMF package: a toolkit implementing mass functions and statistical tools to analyze them

arXiv:2607.26007 · astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.HE, astro-ph.SR · Submitted 2026-07-28 · Read on arXiv

Theo Richardson, Adam Ginsburg, Sergey Koposov

astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.HE, astro-ph.SR

Submitted: 2026-07-28

Comments: 18 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Includes appendix: 3 pages, 1 figure. To be published in AJ. imf is accessible on pypi at https://pypi.org/project/initial-mass-function and has a GitHub repository at https://github.com/keflavich/imf

DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ae8aef

Code: https://github.com/keflavich/imf

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Mass functions are used in all areas of astrophysics.

Terminology

Abstract

Mass functions are used in all areas of astrophysics. The stellar initial mass function (IMF), in particular, plays a central role in modeling stellar populations in galaxies. However, few dedicated tools for working directly with the IMF and its precursor functions are widely available. We present the imf package, a Python library integrated into the wider scientific Python ecosystem that implements common and variant forms of mass functions, especially the IMF and its pre- and protostellar equivalents, as probability distribution functions based on SciPy's statistics architecture. This package enables the performance of operations such as sampling and integration on a wide array of highly customizable mass functions. imf is publicly available on the Python package index pypi under the project name initial mass function.

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