A theory on the slope of the IMF

Molecular clouds are clumpy, and the mass spectrum (dN/dM) of clumps scales with the clump mass M to the -1.5 power, as determined from CO observations of molecular clouds (Blitz 1988, Stutzki et al. 1989). The basic idea is to translate the mass spectrum of clumps into a mass spectrum of stars (that are assumed to form from these clumps) by virtue of a clump-star (i.e. initial-final) mass relation.