Col-OSSOS: Evidence for a Compositional Gradient Inherited from the Protoplanetary Disk?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the present-day Kuiper Belt, the number of compositional classes and the orbital distributions of these classes hold important cosmogonic implications for the solar system. The Colours of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (Col-OSSOS) recently showed that the observed color distribution of small ( H ⪆ 6) trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) can be accounted for by the existence of only two composition classes, named BrightIR and FaintIR, where the range of colors in each class can be modeled as mixtures of two material end-members. Here, we combine the high-precision photometric measurements of Col-OSSOS with those of previous surveys to investigate the orbital distribution of the two color classes and reinterpret the known color–inclination correlation of TNOs in the context of the BrightIR/FaintIR taxonomy. In addition to confirming the previously reported distinct orbital distributions of these classes, we identify a trend of increasing orbital inclinations toward the bluer end of the optical and near-infrared color distribution of BrightIR objects. Using the output of numerical simulations investigating the orbital evolution of TNOs during their scattering phase with Neptune, we show that this trend could reflect a composition gradient in the early protoplanetary disk, in the range of heliocentric distances over which TNOs from the BrightIR class accreted. However, tensions between this interpretation and the existence of blue contaminants among cold classical TNOs, and possible alternative origins for the detected correlation, currently bear uncertainty on our proposed interpretation.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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 it