THE RISE AND FALL OF PASSIVE DISK GALAXIES: MORPHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION ALONG THE RED SEQUENCE REVEALED BY COSMOS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The increasing abundance of passive “red-sequence” galaxies since z ∼ 1–2 is mirrored by a coincident rise in the number of galaxies with spheroidal morphologies. In this paper, however, we show in detail, that, the correspondence between galaxy morphology and color is not perfect, providing insight into the physical origin of this evolution. Using the COSMOS survey, we study a significant population of red-sequence galaxies with disk-like morphologies. These passive disks typically have Sa–Sb morphological types with large bulges, but they are not confined to dense environments. They represent nearly one-half of all red-sequence galaxies and dominate at lower masses (≲10 10 M ☉ ) where they are increasingly disk-dominated. As a function of time, the abundance of passive disks with M * ≲ 10 11 M ☉ increases, but not as fast as red-sequence spheroidals in the same mass range. At higher mass, the passive disk population has declined since z ∼ 1, likely because they transform into spheroidals. Based on these trends, we estimate that as much as 60% of galaxies transitioning onto the red sequence evolve through a passive disk phase. The origin of passive disks therefore has broad implications for our understanding of how star formation shuts down. Because passive disks tend to be more bulge-dominated than their star-forming counterparts, a simple fading of blue disks does not fully explain their origin. We explore the strengths and weaknesses of several more sophisticated explanations, including environmental effects, internal stabilization, and disk regrowth during gas-rich mergers. While previous work has sought to explain color and morphological transformations with a single process, these observations open the way to new insight by highlighting the fact that galaxy evolution may actually proceed through several separate stages.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".