THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEPENDENCE OF THE LUMINOSITY--SIZE RELATION FOR GALAXIES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We have examined the luminosity–size relationship as a function of environment for 12,150 Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies with precise visual classifications from the catalog of Nair & Abraham. Our analysis is subdivided into investigations of early-type galaxies and late-type galaxies. Early-type galaxies reveal a surprisingly tight luminosity–size relation. The dispersion in luminosity about the fiducial relation is only ∼0.14 dex (0.35 mag), even though the sample contains galaxies that differ by a factor of almost 100 in luminosity. The dispersion about the luminosity–size relation is comparable to the dispersion about the fundamental plane, even though the luminosity–size relation is fundamentally simpler and computed using purely photometric parameters. We attribute this to using a clean sample of elliptical galaxies and a large Petrosian size measure, implying that the fundamental plane may closely resemble a fundamental line, provided a different (and arguably better) size measurement is adopted. The key contributors to the dispersion about the luminosity–size relation are found to be color and central concentration expanding our analysis to the full range of morphological types, we show that the slope, zero point, and scatter about the luminosity–size relation are independent of environmental density. Our study thus indicates that whatever process is building galaxies is doing so in a way that preserves fundamental scaling laws even as the typical luminosity of galaxies changes with environment. However, the distribution of galaxies along the luminosity–size relation is found to be strongly dependent on galaxy environment. This variation is in the sense that, at a given morphology, larger and more luminous galaxies are rarer in sparser environments. Our analysis of late-type galaxy morphologies reveals that scatter increases toward later Hubble types. Taken together, these results place strong constraints on conventional hierarchical models in which galaxies are built up in an essentially stochastic way.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".