The Kennicutt–Schmidt Law and Gas Scale Height in Luminous and Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A new analysis of high-resolution data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array for five luminous or ultraluminous infrared galaxies gives a slope for the Kennicutt–Schmidt (KS) relation equal to for gas surface densities Σ mol > 10 3 M ⊙ pc −2 and an assumed constant CO-to-H 2 conversion factor. The velocity dispersion of the CO line, σ v , scales approximately as the inverse square root of Σ mol , making the empirical gas scale height determined from nearly constant, 150–190 pc, over 1.5 orders of magnitude in Σ mol . This constancy of H implies that the average midplane density, which is presumably dominated by CO-emitting gas for these extreme star-forming galaxies, scales linearly with the gas surface density, which in turn implies that the gas dynamical rate (the inverse of the freefall time) varies with , thereby explaining most of the super-linear slope in the KS relation. Consistent with these relations, we also find that the mean efficiency of star formation per freefall time is roughly constant, 5%–7%, and the gas depletion time decreases at high Σ mol , reaching only ∼16 Myr at Σ mol ∼ 10 4 M ⊙ pc −2 . The variation of σ v with Σ mol and the constancy of H are in tension with some feedback-driven models, which predict σ v to be more constant and H to be more variable. However, these results are consistent with simulations in which large-scale gravity drives turbulence through a feedback process that maintains an approximately constant Toomre Q instability parameter.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".