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When Astronomers Attack
An astronomer in Spain pulled telescope logs from Google, and that has a Caltech astronomer upset.
The competition for scoops extends beyond the fickle world of mass media. When Jose-Luis Ortiz announced in July the discovery of a stellar object beyond Neptune, many in the scientific world were surprised by the findings.
A New Scientist report says no one was more surprised than Mike Brown, who saw his plans to disclose the existence of 2003 EL61 at a September conference in the UK suddenly evaporate.
Now, words like "unethical" and "fraud" have been tossed into what should be a purely academic conversation. The episode with 2003 EL61 led Dr. Brown to contact the Minor Planetary Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The MPC informed him that his telescope logs were publicly available.
Google apparently indexed those logs. That prospect caused Dr. Brown to call a press conference and announce the existence of another object, 2003 UB313, which was also part of the data in the telescope logs.
Dr. Ortiz noted in a Yahoo group that nothing improper took place. "A Google search on K40506A leads to a public web page with what appears to be coordinates of many things," New Scientist cites him writing to the group.
The issue seems to be one that concerns when certain discoveries should be announced. Objects that are as far out in space as the one in question don't need to be disclosed immediately, since there is plenty of time to study them.
However, the Internet makes publicly accessible data easily and quickly found. Astronomers may have to put aside the slower pace of researching distant objects at length before disclosing their findings.
The other option would be to restrict data, like telescope logs, from being publicly accessible for indexing. That would be a surprising choice to see the scientific community make.
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David Utter
