Why doesn't star size distribution conform to space rock size distribution? The number of space rocks is exponentially related to the size of the rocks. There are more small space rocks than big ones. Stars are most commonly the size of the sun, big and smaller stars are rare, and giant stars are the rarest. Stars that are 0.5 solar masses should also be very bright and visible, but they are less numerous, when they should be more frequent than the sun.
What about planets? There should be many unaccompanied planets wandering in the darkness of space, without a star, and they should be a lot more common than stars themselves, becaues of the size distribution of space rocks and stars should be roughly parallel.
What am I missing?
graph of star size distribtion.
graph of space rock size distribution.
You are comparing distributions in a way that they are not easily comparable and the eye is misled: watch the scaling of your axes of the plots you compare! In order to compare, you want to make sure that you use similar, either log-log for both graphs or linear-linear or something else - but identical in both graphs.
Mind also that the size distribution of the small solar system objects is NOT an exponential, but a power law distribution. A power law distribution is a sloped straight line in a log-log plot and the exponent of the power law is found in the slope in such plot.
The stellar size distribution usually is found under the keyword &quot;initial mass function&quot;. And when you look at that (see the plot therein), you will find, that the size distribution of stars also follows a similar power law as does the size distribution of smaller bodies as found in our solar system. This ignores the evolution of stars - but that is what you want to do in order to compare the sizes of objects as they are created.
The slopes of the size distributions course differ as different processes play a role in formation of stars and the objects forming around a star-being-born.