We’re in the midst of a particularly cloudy spell here in West Michigan. With all the clouds and snow, we’ve not been able to see the sky much. But it isn’t cloudy everywhere and professional and amateur astronomers around the world remain hard at work.
Professional astronomers report their advances in many high-brow journals, including The Astronomical Journal, the Astrophysical Journal, and Astronomy and Astrophysics. I don’t suppose many of you subscribe to these publications; they aren’t easy reads and don’t make good coffee-table books.
But if you’re ever interested to see what collectively the professional astronomical community does with its time, have a look at arXiv.org. This website is a document server where authors post their work before they submit to the major research journals. ArXiv.org is hosted by the Cornell University Library, with partial financial support from the National Science Foundation.
Here are a few of the astrophysics papers recently submitted to the archive.
How about having a look at “The Elliptical-Spheroidal and Elliptical-Elliptical Galaxy Dichotomies,” by John Kormendy at the University of Texas, Austin. Professor Kormendy analyzed a large amount of existing data on galaxies to conclude that galaxies known as spheroidals are not dwarf elliptical galaxies, but defunct late-type galaxies. This solves a long-standing problem in galaxy structure and evolution, believe it or not.
Check out “Discovery of Very High-Energy Gamma-Ray Radiation from the BL Lac 1ES 0806+524,” by a team of no fewer than 92 authors from around the world, literally. You might wonder how so many scientists can write a twelve-page paper (double spaced, with a few figures). The truth is that the paper was likely written by just one or two authors, who included the other collaborating scientists in the author list.
This work is based on data collected by an instrument called The Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS, another clever acronym). VERITAS is a new, major ground-based gamma-ray observatory. The observatory consists of an array of twelve-meter-diameter (almost forty feet) telescopes located in Amado, Arizona.
Or you could read “Revisiting the Confrontation of the Energy Conditions with Supernovae Data,” which will soon appear the Journal of Modern Physics D. The authors (M.P. Lima, S.D.P. Vitenti and M.J. Reboucas) write: “In the standard Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) approach to model the Universe the violation of the so-called energy conditions is related to some important properties of the Universe as, for example, the current and the inflationary accelerating expansion phases.” And it gets worse from there.
Anyway, these are just three of the sixty-six astrophysics papers that were submitted to arXiv.org by 5 am EST today. Presently, about 5,000 papers are submitted to arXiv.org each month, across the disciplines it hosts: astrophysics, physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, and statistics.
The average montly upload rate to arxiv.org (click the image to hit the arxiv.org statistics page).
In the seventeen-some years arXiv.org has been collecting submissions, it has amassed more than half a million works.
One of the many, an oldie but goodie, is “The Ammount of Interstellar Carbon Locked in Solid Hydrogenated Amorphous Carbon,” by D.G. Furton, J.W. Laiho and A.N. Witt, from 1999. Complete with the misspelling in the title. I’ve always needed a good editor.
And all of these works are there for you to browse — for free — when the clouds in West Michigan keep you from gazing at the stars.
This column originally appeared in the Grand Haven Tribune on 5 December 2008.
