The integrated metallicity profile of the Milky Way
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The heavy element abundance profiles of galaxies place stringent constraints on galaxy growth and assembly history. As the Milky Way is currently the only spiral galaxy in which we can measure temporally resolved chemical abundances, it enables insights into the origin of metallicity gradients and their correlation with the growth history of galaxies. However, until now, these abundance profiles have not been translated into the integrated-light measurements that are needed to compare the Milky Way with the general galaxy population. Here we report the measurement of the light-weighted, integrated stellar metallicity profile of our Galaxy. We find that the integrated stellar metallicity profile of the Milky Way has a ∧-like broken shape, with a mildly positive gradient inside a Galactocentric radius of 7 kpc and a steep negative gradient outside. This broken integrated metallicity profile of the Milky Way is not unique but is not common among Milky Way-mass star-forming galaxies observed in the MaNGA survey and simulated in the TNG50 cosmological simulation. Our results suggest that the Milky Way might not have a typical metallicity distribution for a galaxy of its mass, and thus offers valuable insight into the rich variety of galaxy enrichment processes.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".