Power-laws from critical gravitational collapse: The mass distribution of subsolar objects

Abstract

Critical gravitational collapse and self similarity are used to probe the mass distribution of subsolar objects. We demonstrate that at very low mass the distribution is given by a power law, with an exponent opposite in sign to that observed at high-mass regime. We further show that the value of this low-mass exponent is in principle calculable via dynamical systems theory applied to gravitational collapse. Qualitative agreement between numerical experiments and observational data is good.