The formation and survival of the Milky Way’s oldest stellar disk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It remains a mystery when our Milky Way first formed a stellar disk component that survived and maintained its disk structure from subsequent galaxy mergers. We present a study of the age-dependent structure and star formation rate of the Milky Way’s disk using high-α stars with substantial orbital angular momentum that have precise age determinations. Our results show that the radial scale length is nearly independent of age, whereas the vertical scale height experienced dramatic evolution. A disk-like geometry presents even for populations older than 13 Gyr, with the scale height-to-length ratio dropping below 0.5 for populations younger than 12.5 Gyr. We dub the oldest population that has maintained a disk geometry—apparently formed over 13 Gyr ago—PanGu. With an estimated present-day stellar mass of approximately 2 × 109 M⊙, PanGu is presumed to be a major stellar component of our Galaxy in the earliest epoch. The total present-day stellar mass of the whole high-α disk is 2 × 1010 M⊙, which was mostly formed during a distinct star formation rate peak of 11 M⊙ per year around 11 Gyr ago. A comparison with Milky Way analogues in the TNG50 simulations implies that our Galaxy has experienced an exceptionally quiescent dynamical history, even before the Gaia–Enceladus merger. The Milky Way contains an extremely long-lived stellar disk component that formed, according to this study, more than 13 billion years ago. Such longevity is due to the exceptionally quiescent dynamical history of the Galaxy.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".