Random fragmentation of turbulent molecular clouds lying in the central
  region of giant galaxies
  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.
