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Creators/Authors contains: "Costa, Edgardo"

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  1. Abstract A complete accounting of nearby objects—from the highest-mass white dwarf progenitors down to low-mass brown dwarfs—is now possible, thanks to an almost complete set of trigonometric parallax determinations from Gaia, ground-based surveys, and Spitzer follow-up. We create a census of objects within a Sun-centered sphere of 20 pc radius and check published literature to decompose each binary or higher-order system into its separate components. The result is a volume-limited census of ∼3600individualstar formation products useful in measuring the initial mass function across the stellar (<8M) and substellar (≳5MJup) regimes. Comparing our resulting initial mass function to previous measurements shows good agreement above 0.8Mand a divergence at lower masses. Our 20 pc space densities are best fit with a quadripartite power law, ξ ( M ) = dN / dM M α , with long-established values ofα= 2.3 at high masses (0.55 <M< 8.00M), andα= 1.3 at intermediate masses (0.22 <M< 0.55M), but at lower masses, we findα= 0.25 for 0.05 <M< 0.22M, andα= 0.6 for 0.01 <M< 0.05M. This implies that the rate of production as a function of decreasing mass diminishes in the low-mass star/high-mass brown dwarf regime before increasing again in the low-mass brown dwarf regime. Correcting for completeness, we find a star to brown dwarf number ratio of, currently, 4:1, and an average mass per object of 0.41M
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