THE STELLAR POPULATION STRUCTURE OF THE GALACTIC DISK
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The spatial structure of stellar populations with different chemical abundances in the Milky Way (MW) contains a wealth of information on Galactic evolution over cosmic time. We use data on 14,699 red-clump stars from the APOGEE survey, covering , to determine the structure of mono-abundance populations (MAPs)—stars in narrow bins in and —accounting for the complex effects of the APOGEE selection function and the spatially variable dust obscuration. We determine that all MAPs with enhanced are centrally concentrated and are well-described as exponentials with a scale length of over the whole radial range of the disk. We discover that the surface-density profiles of low- MAPs are complex: they do not monotonically decrease outwards, but rather display a peak radius ranging from to at low . The extensive radial coverage of the data allows us to measure radial trends in the thickness of each MAP. While high- MAPs have constant scale heights, low- MAPs flare. We confirm, now with high-precision abundances, previous results that each MAP contains only a single vertical scale height and that low- , low- and high- , high- MAPs have intermediate ( ) scale heights that smoothly bridge the traditional thin- and thick-disk divide. That the high- , thick disk components do not flare is strong evidence against their thickness being caused by radial migration. The correspondence between the radial structure and chemical-enrichment age of stellar populations is clear confirmation of the inside-out growth of galactic disks. The details of these relations will constrain the variety of physical conditions under which stars form throughout the MW disk.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".