Abstract A stochastic model of fragmentation of molecular clouds has been developed for studying the resulting Initial Mass Function (IMF) where the number of fragments, inter-occurrence time of fragmentation, masses and velocities of the fragments are random variables. Here two turbulent patterns of the velocities of the fragments have been considered, namely, Gaussian and Gamma distributions. It is found that for Gaussian distribution of the turbulent velocity, the IMFs are shallower in general compared to Salpeter mass function. On the contrary, a skewed distribution for turbulent velocity leads to an IMF which is much closer to Salpeter mass function. The above result might be due to the fact that strong driving mechanisms e.g. shocks, arising out of a big explosion occurring at the centre of the galaxy or due to big number of supernova explosions occurring simultaneously in massive parent clouds during the evolution of star clusters embedded into them are responsible for stripping out most of the gas from the clouds. This inhibits formation of massive stars in large numbers making the mass function a steeper one.

中文翻译：

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位于巨星系中心区域的湍流分子云的随机碎裂

摘要 分子云破碎的随机模型已被开发用于研究由此产生的初始质量函数 (IMF)，其中碎片的数量、碎片的出现间隔时间、碎片的质量和速度是随机变量。这里考虑了碎片速度的两种湍流模式，即高斯分布和伽马分布。发现对于湍流速度的高斯分布，与 Salpeter 质量函数相比，IMF 通常更浅。相反，湍流速度的偏态分布导致 IMF 更接近 Salpeter 质量函数。上述结果可能是由于强大的驱动机制，例如冲击，由星系中心发生的大爆炸或由于嵌入其中的星团演化过程中在大质量母云中同时发生的大量超新星爆炸导致大部分气体从云中剥离。这抑制了大量大质量恒星的形成，使质量函数变得更陡峭。