Are galactic star formation and quenching governed by local, global, or environmental phenomena?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT We present an analysis of star formation and quenching in the SDSS-IV MaNGA-DR15, utilizing over 5 million spaxels from ∼3500 local galaxies. We estimate star formation rate surface densities (ΣSFR) via dust corrected H α flux where possible, and via an empirical relationship between specific star formation rate (sSFR) and the strength of the 4000 Å break (D4000) in all other cases. We train a multilayered artificial neural network (ANN) and a random forest (RF) to classify spaxels into ‘star-forming’ and ‘quenched’ categories given various individual (and groups of) parameters. We find that global parameters (pertaining to the galaxy as a whole) perform collectively the best at predicting when spaxels will be quenched, and are substantially superior to local/spatially resolved and environmental parameters. Central velocity dispersion is the best single parameter for predicting quenching in central galaxies. We interpret this observational fact as a probable consequence of the total integrated energy from active galactic neucleus (AGN) feedback being traced by the mass of the black hole, which is well known to correlate strongly with central velocity dispersion. Additionally, we train both an ANN and RF to estimate ΣSFR values directly via regression in star-forming regions. Local/spatially resolved parameters are collectively the most predictive at estimating ΣSFR in these analyses, with stellar mass surface density at the spaxel location (Σ*) being by far the best single parameter. Thus, quenching is fundamentally a global process but star formation is governed locally by processes within each spaxel.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".