Does the HCN/CO Ratio Trace the Star-forming Fraction of Gas? I. A Comparison with Analytical Models of Star Formation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We use archival ALMA observations of the HCN and CO J = 1–0 transitions, in addition to the radio continuum at 93 GHz, to assess the relation between dense gas, star formation, and gas dynamics in 10 nearby (ultra)luminous IR galaxies (U)LIRGs and late-type galaxy centers. We frame our results in the context of turbulent and gravoturbulent models of star formation to assess whether the HCN/CO ratio tracks the gravitationally bound star-forming gas in molecular clouds (f grav) at subkiloparsec scales in nearby galaxies. We confirm that the HCN/CO ratio is a tracer of gas above n SF ≈ 104.5 cm−3, but the subkiloparsec variations in HCN/CO do not universally track f grav. We find strong evidence for the use of varying star formation density-threshold models, which are able to reproduce trends observed in t dep and ϵ ff that fixed-threshold models do not reproduce. Composite lognormal and power-law models outperform pure lognormal models in reproducing the observed trends, even when a fixed power-law slope is used. The ability of the composite models to better reproduce the star formation properties of the gas provides additional indirect evidence that the star formation efficiency per freefall time is proportional to the fraction of gravitationally bound gas.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".