An almost dark galaxy with the mass of the Small Magellanic Cloud
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Almost dark galaxies are objects that have eluded detection by traditional surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The low surface brightness of these galaxies ( μ r (0) > 26 mag arcsec −2 ), and hence their low surface stellar mass density (a few solar masses per pc 2 or less), suggest that the energy density released by baryonic feedback mechanisms is inefficient in modifying the distribution of the dark matter halos they inhabit. For this reason, almost dark galaxies are particularly promising for probing the microphysical nature of dark matter. In this paper, we present the serendipitous discovery of Nube, an almost dark galaxy with ⟨ μ V ⟩ e ∼ 26.7 mag arcsec −2 . The galaxy was identified using deep optical imaging from the IAC Stripe82 Legacy Project. Follow-up observations with the 100 m Green Bank Telescope strongly suggest that the galaxy is at a distance of 107 Mpc. Ultra-deep multi-band observations with the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias favour an age of ∼10 Gyr and a metallicity of [Fe/H] ∼ −1.1. With a stellar mass of ∼4 × 10 8 M ⊙ and a half-mass radius of R e = 6.9 kpc (corresponding to an effective surface density of ⟨Σ⟩ e ∼ 0.9 M ⊙ pc −2 ), Nube is the most massive and extended object of its kind discovered so far. The galaxy is ten times fainter and has an effective radius three times larger than typical ultradiffuse galaxies with similar stellar masses. Galaxies with comparable effective surface brightness within the Local Group have very low mass (tens of 10 5 M ⊙ ) and compact structures (effective radius R e < 1 kpc). Current cosmological simulations within the cold dark matter scenario, including baryonic feedback, do not reproduce the structural properties of Nube. However, its highly extended and flattened structure is consistent with a scenario where the dark matter particles are ultralight axions with a mass of m B = (0.8 −0.2 +0.4 ) × 10 −23 eV.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".