Astro News Time

Astronomy article on the frontpage of CNN? Check!
Multiple astronomy articles on the frontpage of CNN? Check!
It must be that AAS Meeting time of the year. Check!

Interesting that they're both Geoff Marcy, poster child for exoplanets. I wonder if there isn't anyone else there or something - the Summer meetings are usually less well-populated than the Winter meetings. Interesting that Marcy's in the middle of an observing run during the conference, a coincidence made possible by the meeting being in Hawaii this year. And my stupid school gives me $300 a year for professional development funds. *grumble*

Oh foo, next year's meetings are in boring places, so even if I get that NASA grant (yeah, it's still pending *grumble*) it won't be that exciting. Too bad, 2009's are both in California.

Selection Effect

You are sitting on a chair with a notebook. You're kinda tired, so you keep dozing off. A noise wakes you, and you look up to see a woman rummaging through her purse. You make a note in your notebook. A while later she leaves. You doze off again. You hear women's voices outside in the hallway, and open your eyes as two walk in. Two more notes in your notebook. A woman jangling her keys is noted a few minutes later, another woman tossing something in the trash, and so on.

At the end of the day you have seen 212 women, and you yourself are the only man. Do you conclude that...

A) Women make more noise so when the men entered you didn't hear them and didn't mark them down? (A selection effect or bias.) -OR-
b) The room you were in has some reason for there to be more women - you're in the common room at a woman's dorm, you're in a woman's bathroom, you're in the lobby to an operahouse, you're in a nail salon, etc.? (There's a real effect.)

At what point do we decide that an observation is due to a detection bias, and at what point do we realize that despite the detection bias we're observing a real effect?

Exoplanet data

The furthest discovered exoplanet is OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, at 21,500±3,300 ly distance. However, it is an anomaly, as it was discovered using gravitational lensing, which I believe allows us to detect things much further away than the other methods, so the fact that most exoplanets have been discovered by other methods leads me to think I should throw out lensing-detected exoplanets.

Wikipedia also has a list of all 212 exoplanets discovered to date, that I intend to comb though. It occurs to me that if I do a rigorous job of this, I could submit it as a literature review to a peer-reviewed astronomy journal. One problem is (in addition to getting primary sources for the Wikipedia info) it would require me to confirm that no one else has published the same thing. To that effect, a couple links for me (and anyone else curious):

• ADS Abs - a searchable archive of all published peer-reviewed astronomy papers. I think it stands for Astrophysical Database Service Abstracts, but I could be wrong. Hosted by Harvard.


• Astro-ph - another searchable archive of astronomy papers, not as good a search engine, but includes papers that are in the process of peer-review and aren't yet published. Hosted by Los Alamos National Labs.