Ancient Very Metal-poor Stars Associated with the Galactic Disk in the H3 Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Ancient, very metal-poor (VMP) stars offer a window into the earliest epochs of galaxy formation and assembly. We combine data from the H3 Spectroscopic Survey and Gaia to measure metallicities, abundances of α elements, stellar ages, and orbital properties of a sample of 482 VMP ([Fe/H] < −2) stars in order to constrain their origins. This sample is confined to 1 ≲ ∣ Z ∣ ≲ 3 kpc from the Galactic plane. We find that >70% of VMP stars near the disk are on prograde orbits and this fraction increases toward lower metallicities. This result is unexpected if metal-poor stars are predominantly accreted from many small systems with no preferred orientation, as such a scenario would imply a mostly isotropic distribution. Furthermore, we find there is some evidence for higher fractions of prograde orbits among stars with lower [ α /Fe]. Isochrone-based ages for main-sequence turn-off stars reveal that these VMP stars are uniformly old (≈12 Gyr) irrespective of the α abundance and metallicity, suggesting that the metal-poor population was not born from the same well-mixed gas disk. We speculate that the VMP population has a heterogeneous origin, including both in situ formation in the ancient disk and accretion from a satellite with the same direction of rotation as the ancient disk at early times. Our precisely measured ages for these VMP stars on prograde orbits show that the Galaxy has had a relatively quiescent merging history over most of cosmic time, and implies the angular momentum alignment of the Galaxy has been in place for at least 12 Gyr.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".