Giant Molecular Cloud Populations in Nearby Galaxies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We present new results from a comparative analysis of the resolved giant molecular cloud (GMC) populations in six nearby galaxies. We show that the GMCs in denser environments–M51, the centre of NGC6946–have greater CO surface brightness and higher velocity dispersions relative to their size than GMCs in less dense environments. We find systematic differences in the GMC mass distribution among galaxies, such that more of the molecular gas in the low-mass galaxies (M33, the Large Magellanic Cloud) and the outer disk of M31 is located in low mass clouds. Using the number density of GMCs in the interarm regions of M51, we argue that GMC destruction in this region is regulated by shear, and that cloud lifetimes there are finite and short, ~20 to 30 Myr. Our results indicate the importance of galactic environment on the evolution of GMCs, and on a galaxy's global pattern of star formation.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".