Simulation of the Earth's radio leakage from mobile towers as seen from selected nearby stellar systems [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13779


Mobile communication towers represent a relatively new but growing contributor to the total radio leakage associated with planet Earth. We investigate the overall power contribution of mobile communication towers to the Earth\’s radio leakage budget, as seen from a selection of different nearby stellar systems. We created a model of this leakage using publicly available data of mobile tower locations. The model grids the planet’s surface into small, computationally manageable regions, assuming a simple integrated transmission pattern for the mobile antennas. In this model, these mobile tower regions rise and set as the Earth rotates. In this way, a dynamic power spectrum of the Earth was determined, summed over all cellular frequency bands. We calculated this dynamic power spectrum from three different viewing points, HD 95735, Barnard star, and Alpha Centauri A. Our preliminary results demonstrate that the peak power leaking into space from mobile towers is $\sim 4$GW. This is associated with LTE mobile tower technology emanating from the East Coast of China as viewed from HD 95735. We demonstrate that the mobile tower leakage is periodic, direction dependent, and could not currently be detected by a nearby civilization located within 10 light years of the Earth, using instrumentation with a sensitivity similar to the Green Bank Telescope. We plan to extend our model to include more powerful 5G mobile systems, radar installations, ground based uplinks (including the Deep Space Network), and various types of satellite services, including low Earth orbit constellations such as Starlink and OneWeb.

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R. Saide, M. Garrett and N. Heeralall-Issur
Fri, 28 Apr 23
17/68

Comments: N/A

A Glimpse of International Cooperation in Astrophysical Sciences in India [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2304.05626


Astronomy and Astrophysics is an observational science dealing with celestial objects. Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) is one of the premier institutions in astronomy and astrophysics and has contributed significantly in this field. No doubt, India is a part of several mega-science projects in the domain of Astronomy and Astrophysics, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT); Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) projects. Growing engagement of India with mega-science projects has brought a positive impact on its science and technology landscape. A few such collaborations are mentioned to demonstrate that international cooperation are necessary in the field of Astrophysical sciences.

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R. Sagar
Thu, 13 Apr 23
43/59

Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure, Invited article

Chromaticity Effects on the Outcomes of Spheroid-based Scored Events [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17637


The immense popularity of spheroid-based scored events (colloquially “football games”) motivates the desire to better understand the underlying mechanisms affecting their outcomes. By construction of these events, participants must distinguish the spheroidal ball from not only the background, but also their team and enemy players, which are marked by self-assigned linear combinations of specific frequencies of electromagnetic magnetic radiation, known as uniform color. We investigate chromatic effects on the outcome of such events. We do this by finding the correlation between the color contrast and the success of several key spheroidal ball match tactics. We perform this analysis for the 2020 NFL regular season, focusing on moves in which uniform colors may be a factor in performance. We conduct a primary analysis using each team’s cumulative results over the season, but in doing so neglect non-uniformity in the chosen uniform color per individual. We then conduct a secondary analysis of the performance per game of a single team, the Seattle Seahawks, which exhibited large uniform color variability for the 2020 NFL regular season. In this work, tackles and completions are considered. The Pearson correlation coefficient is then calculated for both tactics. We find little evidence of chromaticity effects, with correlation values of $r_t=-0.0885\pm 0.1819$ and $r_c-0.0292\pm0.1825 $, respectively, for the primary analysis.

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L. McBride and M. Pagano
Mon, 3 Apr 23
46/53

Comments: 8 pages, 4 Figures

Gender and Precarity in Astronomy [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10105


Following the survey Well-being in astrophysics that was sent out in March 2021, to establish how astrophysics researchers, primarily in France, experience their career, some of the results were published in Webb et al. (2021). Here we further analyse the data to determine if gender can cause different experiences in astrophysics. We also study the impact on the well-being of temporary staff (primarily PhD students and postdocs), compared to permanent staff. Whilst more temporary staff stated that they felt permanently overwhelmed than permanent staff, the experiences in astrophysics for the different genders were in general very similar, except in one area. More than three times more females than males experienced harassment or discrimination, rising sharply for gender discrimination and sexual harassment, where all of those having experienced sexual harassment and who had provided their gender in the survey, were female. Further, as previously reported (Webb et al. 2021), 20% of the respondents had suffered mental health issues before starting their career in astrophysics. We found that whilst this group was split approximately equally with regards to males and females, the number rose sharply to almost 45% of astronomers experiencing mental health issues since starting in astrophysics. Of this population, there were 50% more females than males. This excess of females was almost entirely made up of the population of women that had been harassed or discriminated against.

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N. Webb, C. Bot, S. Charpinet, et. al.
Mon, 20 Mar 23
48/51

Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure, published in the SF2A-2022: Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Eds.: J. Richard, A. Siebert, E. Lagadec, N. Lagarde, O. Venot, J. Malzac, J.-B. Marquette, M. N’Diaye, D. Briot, pp.171-175

Nonprofit Adopt a Star: Lessons from 15 years of Crowdfunding [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05598


In the past 15 years, the number of known planets outside of our solar system has grown from about 200 to more than 5000. During that time, we have conducted one of the longest crowdfunding campaigns in history, a nonprofit adopt a star program that supports astronomy research. The program includes the targets of NASA space telescopes that are searching for planets around other stars, and it uses the proceeds to help determine the properties of those stars and their planetary systems. I summarize how this innovative program has evolved over the years and engaged the public worldwide to support an international team of astronomers.

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T. Metcalfe
Mon, 16 Jan 23
4/50

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures. Project website is at this https URL

Nonprofit Adopt a Star: Lessons from 15 years of Crowdfunding [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05598


In the past 15 years, the number of known planets outside of our solar system has grown from about 200 to more than 5000. During that time, we have conducted one of the longest crowdfunding campaigns in history, a nonprofit adopt a star program that supports astronomy research. The program includes the targets of NASA space telescopes that are searching for planets around other stars, and it uses the proceeds to help determine the properties of those stars and their planetary systems. I summarize how this innovative program has evolved over the years and engaged the public worldwide to support an international team of astronomers.

Read this paper on arXiv…

T. Metcalfe
Mon, 16 Jan 23
14/50

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures. Project website is at this https URL

United by skies, divided by language — astronomy publishing in languages with small reader base [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13434


The mysteries of the Universe are international, the skies are not crossed by borders. However, the knowledge is transmitted by language, imposing linguistic barriers that are often difficult to break through. Bulgaria is considered as an example of a country with relatively small reader base — it has a population of about 6.5 million (2021) and the Bulgarian language has probably $\sim$7 million speakers, if the diaspora in US, Germany and elsewhere is accounted for. The smaller-scale market, in comparison with larger non-English speaking countries, poses a number of limitation to the publishing landscape: (i) the local authors are discouraged to pen both popular and scientific astronomy books, because of the limited financial incentive; (ii) the market is heavily dominated by translations (from Russian before 1989, from English nowdays), but even those are fewer than in bigger countries, because the translation overhead costs are spread over smaller print runs. The history of the astronomy publishing in Bulgaria is summarized, with some distinct periods: pre-1944, the communist era 1944-1989, the modern times post 1989. A few notable publications are reviewed. Finally, some practices to help astronomy book publishing in languages with smaller reader bases are suggested, taking advantage of the recent technological developments.

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V. Ivanov
Thu, 29 Dec 22
12/47

Comments: This is an extended write up of a poster presented at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EAS) held in Valencia, Spain, Jun 26 — Jul 1, 2022, Special Session 34: Diversity and Inclusion in European Astronomy (8 pages, 5 figures)

A renewable power system for an off-grid sustainable telescope fueled by solar power, batteries and green hydrogen [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03823


A large portion of astronomy’s carbon footprint stems from fossil fuels supplying the power demand of astronomical observatories. Here, we explore various isolated low-carbon power system setups for the newly planned Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, and compare them to a business-as-usual diesel power generated system. Technologies included in the designed systems are photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, diesel generators, batteries, and hydrogen storage. We adapt the electricity system optimization model highRES to this case study and feed it with the telescope’s projected energy demand, cost assumptions for the year 2030 and site-specific capacity factors. Our results show that the lowest-cost system with LCOEs of $116/MWh majorly uses photovoltaics paired with batteries and fuel cells running on imported green hydrogen. Some diesel generators run for backup. This solution would reduce the telescope’s power-side carbon footprint by 95% compared to the business-as-usual case.

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I. Viole, G. Valenzuela-Venegas, M. Zeyringer, et. al.
Thu, 8 Dec 22
1/63

Comments: 16 pages, 10 figures

#Change: How Social Media is Accelerating STEM Inclusion [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03245


The vision of 2030STEM is to address systemic barriers in institutional structures and funding mechanisms required to achieve full inclusion in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and provide leadership opportunities for individuals from underrepresented populations across STEM sectors. 2030STEM takes a systems-level approach to create a community of practice that affirms diverse cultural identities in STEM. This is the first in a series of white papers based on 2030STEM Salons – discussions that bring together visionary stakeholders in STEM to think about innovative ways to infuse justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion into the STEM ecosystem. Our salons identify solutions that come from those who have been most affected by systemic barriers in STEM. Our first salon focused on the power of social media to accelerate inclusion and diversity efforts in STEM. Social media campaigns, such as the #XinSTEM initiatives, are powerful new strategies for accelerating change towards inclusion and leadership by underrepresented communities in STEM. This white paper highlights how #XinSTEM campaigns are redefining community, and provides recommendations for how scientific and funding institutions can improve the STEM ecosystem by supporting the #XinSTEM movement.

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J. Adams, C. Berry, R. Cohen, et. al.
Thu, 8 Dec 22
42/63

Comments: 13 pages, 2 Figures, Also uploaded to the Biorxiv

Managing Activities at the Lunar Poles for Science [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01363


The lunar poles are unique environments of both great scientific and, increasingly, commercial interest. Consequently, a tension exists between the twin objectives of (a) Exploring the lunar poles for both scientific and commercial purposes and ultimately supporting a lunar economy; and (b) Minimising the environmental impacts on the lunar polar regions so as to preserve them for future scientific investigations. We suggest that the best compromise between these equally valuable objectives would be to restrict scientific and commercial activities to the lunar South Pole, while placing a moratorium on activities at the North Pole until the full consequences of human activities at the South Pole are fully understood and mitigation protocols established. Depending on the pace at which lunar exploration proceeds, such a moratorium might last for several decades in order to properly assess the effects of exploration and commercial activities in regions surrounding the South Pole. A longer term possibility might be to consider designating the lunar North Polar region as a (possibly temporary) Planetary Park. Similar protected status might also be desirable for other unique lunar environments, and, by extension, other scientifically important localities elsewhere in the Solar System.

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I. Crawford, P. Prem, C. Peters, et. al.
Mon, 5 Dec 22
31/63

Comments: Accepted for publication in Space Research Today; 7 pages, 1 figure

Which countries are leading high-impact science in astronomy? [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01295


Recent news reports claim that China is overtaking the United States and all other countries in scientific productivity and scientific impact. A straightforward analysis of high-impact papers in astronomy reveals that this is not true in our field. In fact, the United States continues to host, by a large margin, the authors that lead high-impact papers. Moreover, this analysis shows that 90% of all high-impact papers in astronomy are led by authors based in North America and Europe. That is, only about 10% of countries in the world host astronomers that publish “astronomy’s greatest hits”.

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J. Madrid
Mon, 5 Dec 22
49/63

Comments: N/A

Developing a data fusion concept for radar and optical ground based SST station [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04443


As part of the Portuguese Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) program, a tracking radar and a double Wide Field of View Telescope system (4.3{\deg} x 2.3{\deg}) are being installed at the Pampilhosa da Serra Space Observatory (PASO) in the centre of continental Portugal, complementing an already installed deployable optical sensor for MEO and GEO surveillance. The tracking radar will track space debris in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) up to 1000 km and at the same time the telescope will also have LEO tracking capabilities. This article intends to discuss possible ways to take advantage of having these two sensors at the same location. Using both types of sensors takes advantage of the radar measurements which give precise radial velocity and distance to the objects, while the telescope gives better sky coordinates measurements. With the installation of radar and optical sensors, PASO can extend observation time of space debris and correlate information from optical and radar provenances in real time. During twilight periods both sensors can be used simultaneously to rapidly compute new TLEs for LEO objects, eliminating the time delays involved in data exchange between sites in a large SST network. This concept will not replace the need for a SST network with sensors in multiple locations around the globe, but will provide a more complete set of measurements from a given object passage, and therefore increase the added value for initial orbit determination, or monitoring of reentry campaigns of a given location. PASO will contribute to the development of new solutions to better characterize the objects improving the overall SST capabilities and constitute a perfect site for the development and testing of new radar and optical data fusion algorithms and techniques for space debris monitoring.

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B. Coelho, D. Barbosa, M. Bergano, et. al.
Wed, 9 Nov 22
17/76

Comments: 3 pages, 3 figures, Draft accepted for publication at 73rd International Astronautical Congress, Paris 2022

ATLAS: Deployment, Control Platform and First RSO Measurements [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03586


The ever increasing dependence of modern societies in space based services results in a rising number of objects in orbit which grows the probability of collisions between them. The increase in space debris is a threat to space assets, space based-operations and led to a common effort to develop programs for dealing with it. As part of the Portuguese Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) project, led by the Portuguese Ministry of Defense (MoD), Instituto de Telecomunica\c{c}\~oes (IT) is developing the rAdio TeLescope pAmpilhosa Serra (ATLAS), a new monostatic radar tracking sensor located at the Pampilhosa da Serra Space Observatory (PASO), Portugal. The system operates at 5.56 GHz and aims to provide information on objects in low earth orbit (LEO), with cross sections above 10 cm$^2$ at 1000~km. The sensor is tasked by the Portuguese Network Operations Center (NOC), located in the Azores island, which interfaces with the EU-SST network.

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J. Pandeirada, M. Bergano, P. Marques, et. al.
Tue, 8 Nov 22
68/79

Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures, 1 Apendix, Accepted for publication at the Proceedings of the 73rd International Astronautical Congress, Paris, Septembre 2022

Research on the impact of asteroid mining on global equity [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02023


In the future situation, aiming to seek more resources, human beings decided to march towards the mysterious and bright starry sky, which opened the era of great interstellar exploration. According to the Outer Space Treaty, any exploration of celestial bodies should be aimed at promoting global equality and for the benefit of all nations. Firstly, we defined global equity and set a Unified Equity Index (UEI) model to measure it. We merge the factors with greater correlation, and finally, get 6 elements, and then use the entropy method (TEM) to find the dispersion of these elements in different countries. Then use principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the dispersion, and then use the scandalized index to obtain the global equity. Secondly, we simulated a future with asteroid mining and evaluated its impact on Unified Equity Index (UEI). Then, we divided the mineable asteroids into three classes with different mining difficulties and values, identified 28 mining entities including private companies, national and international organizations. We considered changes in the asteroid classes, mining capabilities and mining scales to determine the changes in the value of minerals mined between 2025 and 2085. We convert mining output value into mineral transaction value through allocation matrix. Based on grey relational analysis (GRA). Finally, we presented three possible versions of the future of asteroid mining by changing the conditions. We propose two sets of corresponding policies for changes in future trends in global fairness with asteroid mining. We test the separate and combined effects of these policies and find that they are positive, strongly supporting the effectiveness of our model.

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H. Sun, J. Zhu and Y. Xu
Fri, 4 Nov 22
19/84

Comments: 19 pages

Exploration of M31 via Black-Hole Slingshots and the "Intergalactic Imperative" [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10622


I show that a gravitational slingshot using a stellar-mass black hole (BH) orbiting SgrA* could launch robotic spacecraft toward M31 at $0.1\,c$, a speed that is ultimately limited by the tensile strength of steel and the BH mass, here conservatively estimated as $m_{\rm bh}=5\,M_\odot$. The BH encounter must be accurate to $\lesssim 1\,$km, despite the fact that the BH is dark. Navigation guided by gravitational microlensing can easily achieve this. Deceleration into M31 would rely on a similar engagement (but in reverse) with an orbiting BH near the M31 center. Similarly for a return trip, if necessary. Colonization of M31 planets on 50 Myr timescales is therefore feasible provided that reconstruction of humans, trans-humans, or androids from digital data becomes feasible in the next few Myr. The implications for Fermi’s Paradox (FP) are discussed. FP is restated in a more challenging form. The possibility of intergalactic colonization on timescales much shorter than the age of Earth significantly tightens FP. It can thereby impact our approach to astrobiology on few-decade timescales. I suggest using a network of tight white-dwarf-binary “hubs” as the backbone of a $0.002\,c$ intra-Galactic transport system, which would enable complete exploration of the Milky Way (hence full measurement of all non-zero terms in the Drake equation) on 10 Myr timescales. Such a survey would reveal the reality and/or severity of an “intergalactic imperative”.

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A. Gould
Thu, 20 Oct 22
50/74

Comments: 24 pages, 1 figure

21st Century Global and Regional Surface Temperature Projections [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03245


Many regions across the globe broke their surface temperature records in recent years, further sparking concerns about the impending arrival of “tipping points” later in the 21st century. This study analyzes observed global surface temperature trends in three target latitudinal regions: the Arctic Circle, the Tropics, and the Antarctic Circle. We show that global warming is accelerating unevenly across the planet, with the Arctic warming at approximately three times the average rate of our world. We further analyzed the reliability of latitude-dependent surface temperature simulations from a suite of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 models and their multi-model mean. We found that GISS-E2-1-G and FGOALS-g3 were the best-performing models based on their statistical abilities to reproduce observational, latitude-dependent data. Surface temperatures were projected from ensemble simulations of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2-4.5 (SSP2-4.5). We estimate when the climate will warm by 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5 degrees C relative to the preindustrial period, globally and regionally. GISS-E2-1-G projects that global surface temperature anomalies would reach 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5 degrees C in 2024 (+/-1.34), 2039 (+/-2.83), and 2057 (+/-5.03) respectively, while FGOALS-g3 predicts these “tipping points” would arrive in 2024 (+/-2.50), 2054 (+/-7.90), and 2087 (+/-10.55) respectively. Our results reaffirm a dramatic, upward trend in projected climate warming acceleration, with upward concavity in 21st century projections of the Arctic, which could lead to catastrophic consequences across the Earth. Further studies are necessary to determine the most efficient solutions to reduce global warming acceleration and maintain a low SSP, both globally and regionally.

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N. Ma, J. Jiang, K. Hou, et. al.
Mon, 10 Oct 22
18/59

Comments: N/A

Unnecessary risks created by uncontrolled rocket reentries [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02188


In 2020, over 60% of launches to low Earth orbit resulted in one or more rocket bodies being abandoned in orbit and eventually returning to Earth in an uncontrolled manner. When they do so, between 20 and 40% of their mass survives the heat of atmospheric reentry. Many of the surviving pieces are heavy enough to pose serious risks to people, on land, at sea, and in airplanes.
There is no international consensus on the acceptable level of risk from reentering space objects. This is sometimes a point of contention, such as when a 20 tonne Long March 5B core stage made an uncontrolled reentry in May 2021. Some regulators, including the US, France, and ESA, have implemented a 1 in 10,000 acceptable casualty risk (i.e., statistical threat to human life) threshold from reentering space objects. We argue that this threshold ignores the cumulative effect of the rapidly increasing number of rocket launches. It also fails to address low risk, high consequence outcomes, such as a rocket stage crashing into a high-density city or a large passenger aircraft. In the latter case, even a small piece could cause hundreds of casualties. Compounding this, the threshold is frequently ignored or waived when the costs of adherence are deemed excessive.
We analyse the rocket bodies that reentered the atmosphere from 1992 – 2021 and model the associated cumulative casualty expectation. We then extrapolate this trend into the near future (2022 – 2032), modelling the potential risk to the global population from uncontrolled rocket body reentries. We also analyse the population of rocket bodies that are currently in orbit and expected to deorbit soon, and find that the risk distribution is significantly weighted to latitudes close to the equator. This represents a disproportionate burden of casualty risk imposed on the countries of the Global South by major spacefaring countries.

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M. Byers, E. Wright, A. Boley, et. al.
Thu, 6 Oct 22
67/77

Comments: Presented at the 23rd Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference, Maui, Hawaii, in September 2022

A Lunar Backup Record of Humanity [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11155


The risk of a catastrophic or existential disaster for our civilization is increasing this century. A significant motivation for near-term space settlement is the opportunity to safeguard civilization in the event of a planetary-scale disaster. While a catastrophic event could destroy significant cultural, scientific, and technological progress on earth, early space settlements can maintain a backup data storage system of human activity, including the events leading to the disaster. The system would improve the ability of early space settlers to recover our civilization after collapse. We show that advances in laser communications and data storage enable the development of a data storage system on the lunar surface with a sufficient uplink data rate and storage capacity to preserve valuable information about the achievements of our civilization and the chronology of the disaster.

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C. Ezell, A. Lazarian and A. Loeb
Fri, 23 Sep 22
37/70

Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures; submitted for publication

Spectrometry of the Urban Lightscape [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2208.06441


NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth Contains over 30000 photos of 2500 cataloged urban lightscapes (urban night lights) taken from the International Space Station. Over 100 of these multispectral DSLR photos are of sufficient spatial resolution, sharpness and exposure to be used for broadband spectral characterization of urban lightscapes. Analysis of simulated atmospheric transmissivity from the MODTRAN radiative transfer model shows that spectral slopes of transmissivity spectra are relatively insensitive to choice of model atmopshere, with variations in atmospheric path length and aerosol optical depth primarily affecting the bias of the spectrum rather than the slope. This suggests that color tempterature-calibrated RGB channels can be corrected for relative differences in atmospheric scattering and absorption to allow for quantitative intercomparison. A mosaic of 18 intercalibrated RGB photos renders a spectral feature space with four clearly defined spectral endmembers corresponding to white, yellow and red light sources, with brightness modulated by a dark background endmember. These four spectral endmembers form the basis of a linear spectral mixture model which can be inverted to provide estimates of the areal fraction of each endmember present within every pixel instantaneous field of view. The resulting spectral feature space shows two distinct mixing trends extending from the dark endmember to near flat spectrum (white-yellow) and warm spectrum (orange) sources. The distribution of illuminated pixels is strongly skewed toward a lower luminance background of warm spectrum street lighting, with brighter lights generally corresponding to point sources and major thoroughfares. Intercomparison of 18 individual urban lightscape spectral feature spaces show consistent topology, despite variations in exposure and interior mixing trends.

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C. Small
Tue, 16 Aug 22
21/74

Comments: 19 pages, 9 figures

Painting graphs with sounds: CosMonic sonification project [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12984


CosMOnic (COSmos harMONIC) is a sonification project with a triple purpose: analysis (by means of sounds) of any type of data, source of inspiration for artistic creations, and pedagogical and dissemination purposes. In this contribution we present the work recently produced by CosMonic in the latter field, creating specific cases for the inclusive astronomy dissemination project AstroAccesible for blind and partially sighted people, but also aimed at a general public that wants to understand astrophysics in an alternative format. For this project, CosMonic seeks to create simple astronomical cases in their acoustic dimension in order to be easily understood. CosMonic’s philosophy for these sonifications can be summarized in a simple metaphor: painting graphs with sounds. Sonification is a powerful tool that helps to enhance visual information. Therefore, CosMonic accompanies its audios with animations, using complementary methods to reach a general public. In addition to provide some cases created by CosMonic for inclusive astronomy, we also share our experience with different audiences, as well as suggest some ideas for a better use of sonification in (global) inclusive outreach.

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R. García-Benito and E. Pérez-Montero
Fri, 27 May 22
4/61

Comments: 5 pages, 2nd Workshop on Astronomy Beyond the Common Senses for Accessibility and Inclusion, 17-18 November 2021 (virtual). To be appeared in the Proceedings (digital version) of the Revista Mexicana de Astronom\’ia y Astrof\’isica (Serie de Conferencias)

Impact of Economic Constraints on the Projected Timeframe for Human-Crewed Deep Space Exploration [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08061


Deep space exploration offers the most profound opportunity for the expansion of humanity and our understanding of the Universe, but remains extremely challenging. Progress will continue to be paced by uncrewed missions followed up by crewed missions to ever further destinations. Major space powers continue to invest in crewed deep space exploration as an important national strategy. An improved model based on previous work is developed, which projects the earliest possible launch dates for human-crewed missions from cis-lunar space to selected destinations in the Solar System and beyond based on NASA’s historic budget trend and overall development trends of deep space exploration research. The purpose of the analysis is to provide a projected timeframe for crewed missions beyond Mars. Our findings suggest the first human missions from a spacefaring nation or international collaboration to the Asteroid Belt and Jovian System could be scheduled as soon as ~2071 to ~2087 and ~2101 to ~2121, respectively, while a launch to the Saturn System may occur by the year ~2132, with an uncertainty window of ~2129 to ~2153.

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P. Rosen, D. Zhang, J. Jiang, et. al.
Wed, 18 May 22
10/66

Comments: 10 pages, 5 figures

Astronomical observatory publications: information exchange before the Internet era [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08386


For decades, perhaps even centuries, the exchange of publications between observatories was the most important source of information on new astronomical results, either in the form of observational data or new scientific theories. In particular, small observatories or institutions used this method. The exchange of physical material between observatories has now been replaced by the exchange of information via the Internet. Yet much of the ancient material has never been digitized and can only be found in the few existing collections of observatory publications. A recent donation of such a collection from the University of Copenhagen to our own library at the University of Southern Denmark has led us to investigate the uniqueness of such collections: Which observatories and publications are represented in the collections that still exist today? We also examine the availability of the material in the collections.

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O. Ellegaard and S. Dorch
Wed, 18 May 22
61/66

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures,

Avoiding the "Great Filter": An Assessment of Climate Change Solutions and Combinations for Effective Implementation [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2205.00133


Climate change is the long-term shift in global weather patterns, largely caused by anthropogenic activity of greenhouse gas emissions. Global climate temperatures have unmistakably risen and naturally-occurring climate variability alone cannot account for this trend. Human activities are estimated to have caused about 1.0 {\deg}C of global warming above the pre-industrial baseline and if left unchecked, will continue to drastically damage the Earth and its inhabitants. Globally, natural disasters and subsequent economic losses have become increasingly impactful as a result of climate change. Both wildlife ecosystems and human habitats have been negatively impacted, from rising sea levels to alarming frequency of severe weather events around the world. Attempts towards alleviating the effects of global warming have often been at odds and remain divided among a multitude of strategies, reducing the overall effectiveness of these efforts. It is evident that collaborative action is required for avoiding the most severe consequences of climate change. This paper evaluates the main strategies (industrial/energy, political, economic, agricultural, atmospheric, geological, coastal, and social) towards both mitigating and adapting to climate change. As well, it provides an optimal combination of seven solutions which can be implemented simultaneously, working in tandem to limit and otherwise accommodate the harmful effects of climate change. Previous legislation and deployment techniques are also discussed as guides for future endeavors.

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J. Zhang, K. Zhang, M. Zhang, et. al.
Tue, 3 May 22
16/82

Comments: N/A

The Cost of Lunar Landing Pads with a Trade Study of Construction Methods [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2205.00378


This study estimates the cost of building lunar landing pads and examines whether any construction methods are economically superior to others. Some proposed methods require large amounts of mass transported from the Earth, others require high energy consumption on the lunar surface, and others have a long construction time. Each of these factors contributes direct and indirect costs to lunar activities. The most important economic variables turn out to be the transportation cost to the lunar surface and the magnitude of the program delay cost imposed by a construction method. The cost of a landing pad depends sensitively on the optimization of the mass and speed of the construction equipment, so a minimum-cost set of equipment exists for each construction method within a specified economic scenario. Several scenarios have been analyzed across a range of transportation costs with both high and low program delay costs. It is found that microwave sintering is currently the most favorable method to build the inner, high temperature zone of a lunar landing pad, although other methods are within the range of uncertainty. The most favorable method to build the outer, low temperature zone of the landing pad is also sintering when transportation costs are high, but it switches to polymer infusion when transportation costs drop below about \$110K/kg to the lunar surface. It is estimated that the Artemis Basecamp could build a landing pad with a budgeted line-item cost of \$229M assuming that transportation costs will be reduced modestly from the current rate \$1M/kg to the lunar surface to \$300K/kg. A landing pad drops to \$130M when the transportation cost drops further to \$100K/kg, or to \$47M if transportation costs fall below \$10K/kg. Ultimately, landing pads can be built around the Moon at very low cost, due to economies of scale.

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P. Metzger and G. Autry
Tue, 3 May 22
45/82

Comments: 50 pages, 15 figures

The Case for Space Environmentalism [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10025


The shell bound by the Karman line at a height of 80 to 100km above the Earth’s surface, and Geosynchronous Orbit, at 36,000km, is defined as the orbital space surrounding the Earth. It is within this region, and especially in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), where environmental issues are becoming urgent because of the rapid growth of the anthropogenic space object population, including satellite “mega-constellations”. In this Perspective, we summarise the case that the orbital space around the Earth should be considered an additional ecosystem, and so subject to the same care and concerns and the same broad regulations as, for example, the oceans and the atmosphere. We rely on the orbital space environment by looking through it as well as by working within it. Hence, we should consider damage to professional astronomy, public stargazing and the cultural importance of the sky, as well as the sustainability of commercial, civic and military activity in space. Damage to the orbital space environment has problematic features in common with other types of environmental issue. First, the observed and predicted damage is incremental and complex, with many contributors. Second, whether or not space is formally and legally seen as a global commons, the growing commercial exploitation of what may appear a “free” resource is in fact externalising the true costs.

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A. Lawrence, M. Rawls, M. Jah, et. al.
Fri, 22 Apr 22
24/64

Comments: 19 pages, 6 figures. To be published in Nature Astronomy April 22nd 2022. For consistency with Nature policy, the version posted here is the final submitted author text. The final version is available at the DOI below, and differs slightly in wording

Avoiding the Great Filter: Predicting the Timeline for Humanity to Reach Kardashev Type I Civilization [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07070


The level of technological development of any civilization can be gaged in large part by the amount of energy they produce for their use, but also encompasses that civilization’s stewardship of their home world. Following the Kardashev definition, a Type I civilization is able to store and use all the energy available on its planet. In this study, we develop a model based on Carl Sagan’s K formula and use this model to analyze the consumption and energy supply of the three most important energy sources: fossil fuels (e.g., coal, oil, natural gas, crude, NGL and feedstocks), nuclear energy and renewable energy. We also consider environmental limitations suggested by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, and those specific to our calculations to predict when humanity will reach the level of a Kardashev scale Type I civilization. Our findings suggest that the best estimate for this day will not come until year 2371.

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J. Jiang, F. Feng, P. Rosen, et. al.
Fri, 15 Apr 22
49/50

Comments: 15 pages, 7 figures, submitted to journal galaxies, currently under peer-review

Follow the Index: A new proposal [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.17123


Despite all its well-known flaws and calls for its dismissal, the notorious $h$-index is still used in many instances when awarding grants, or promoting and hiring scientists. To address this, I set out to devise a better index, with the twofold aim of taking into account the authors’ respective contributions and considerably reducing the pollution of the scientific literature. Finally, I present a strategy that is guaranteed to be best for all researchers.

Read this paper on arXiv…

H. Boffin
Fri, 1 Apr 22
7/85

Comments: The Astronomical Enquirer – Other articles in this journal are available at this https URL

The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf: Case Studies of Peer Review [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.17095


I present for your appraisal three independent cases of the manuscript referee process conducted by a venerable peer-reviewed scientific journal. Each case involves a little pig, who submitted for consideration a theoretical plan for a house to be constructed presently, in a faraway land. An anonymous big bad wolf was assigned by the journal to assess the merit of these manuscripts. The pigs proposed three distinct construction frameworks, which varied in physical and mathematical sophistication. The first little pig submitted a model of straw, based on the numerical method of toe-counting. His design included odd features, such as spilled millet and cloven-hoofprints on the window sill — possibly a ploy to distract the wolf from the manuscript’s facile mathematical foundation. The second little pig used a more advanced approach, employing Newton’s classical laws of motion, to propose a house of sticks. This pig included in her manuscript copious citations by a specific wolf, possibly aiming to ensure acceptance by flattering the wolf whom she anticipated would be the referee. The third little pig described an ostentatious house of bricks based on an elaborate dynamical systems and stability analysis, possibly scheming to dazzle and impress. The big bad wolf did not appear moved by any of the pigs’ tactics. His recommendations were, for straw: the minor revision of water-proofing; for sticks: the major revision of fire-proofing, given concerns surrounding climate change; for bricks: unequivocal rejection, accompanied by multiple derogatory comments regarding “high-and-mighty theorists.” I describe each case in detail, and suggest that the wolf’s reports might be driven as much by self interest as the manuscripts themselves — namely, that at the time the wolf wrote the reviews, he was rather hungry. Finally, I examine morals learned, if any.

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E. Armstrong
Fri, 1 Apr 22
54/85

Comments: 7 pages, 6 figures. this http URL

Creation of inclusive spaces with astromimicry [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.11218


The Universe can inspire us to design communities that foster equity and inclusion.

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J. Moreno
Wed, 23 Mar 22
7/76

Comments: To appear in Nature Astronomy volume 6, page 291 (2022): this https URL See also: arXiv:2202.05836

SETI, evolution and human history merged into a mathematical model [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.10116


In this paper we propose a new mathematical model capable of merging Darwinian Evolution, Human History and SETI into a single mathematical scheme: 1) Darwinian Evolution over the last 3.5 billion years is defined as one particular realization of a certain stochastic process called Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM). This GBM yields the fluctuations in time of the number of species living on Earth. Its mean value curve is an increasing exponential curve, i.e. the exponential growth of Evolution. 2) In 2008 this author provided the statistical generalization of the Drake equation yielding the number N of communicating ET civilizations in the Galaxy. N was shown to follow the lognormal probability distribution. 3) We call “b-lognormals” those lognormals starting at any positive time b (“birth”) larger than zero. Then the exponential growth curve becomes the geometric locus of the peaks of a one-parameter family of b-lognormals: this is our way to re-define Cladistics. 4) b-lognormals may be also be interpreted as the lifespan of any living being (a cell, or an animal, a plant, a human, or even the historic lifetime of any civilization). Applying this new mathematical apparatus to Human History, leads to the discovery of the exponential progress between Ancient Greece and the current USA as the envelope of all b-lognormals of Western Civilizations over a period of 2500 years. 5) We then invoke Shannon’s Information Theory. The b-lognormals’ entropy turns out to be the index of “development level” reached by each historic civilization. We thus get a numerical estimate of the entropy difference between any two civilizations, like the Aztec-Spaniard difference in 1519. 6) In conclusion, we have derived a mathematical scheme capable of estimating how much more advanced than Humans an Alien Civilization will be when the SETI scientists will detect the first hints about ETs.

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C. Maccone
Tue, 22 Mar 22
7/82

Comments: N/A

Snowmass 2021 Community Survey Report [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.07328


The Snowmass Community Survey was designed by the Snowmass Early Career (SEC) Survey Core Initiative team between April 2020 and June 2021, and released to the community on June 28, 2021. It aims to be a comprehensive assessment of the state of the high-energy particle and astrophysics (HEPA) community, if not the field, though the Snowmass process is largely based within the United States. Among other topics, some of the central foci of the Survey were to gather demographic, career, physics outlook, and workplace culture data on a large segment of the Snowmass community. With nearly $1500$ total interactions with the Survey, the SEC Survey team hopes the findings and discussions within this report will be of service to the community over the next decade. Some conclusions should reinforce the aspects of HEPA which are already functional and productive, while others should strengthen arguments for cultural and policy changes within the field.

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G. Agarwal, J. Barrow, M. Carneiro, et. al.
Tue, 15 Mar 22
53/108

Comments: Contribution to Snowmass 2021. Submitted by the Snowmass Early Career Survey Initiative

A Sonification of the zCOSMOS Galaxy Dataset [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05539


Sonification is the transformation of data into acoustic signals, achievable through different techniques. Sonification can be defined as a way to represent data values and relations as perceivable sounds, aiming at facilitating their communication and interpretation. Like data visualization provides meaning via images, sonification conveys meaning via sound. Sonification approaches are useful in a number of scenario. A first case is the possibility to receive information while keeping other sensory channels free, like in medical environment, in driving experience, etc. Another scenario addresses an easier recognition of patterns when data present high dimensionality and cardinality. Finally, sonification can be applied to presentation and dissemination initiatives, also with artistic goals. The zCOSMOS dataset contains detailed data about almost 20000 galaxies, describing the evolution of a relatively small portion of the universe in the last 10 million years in terms of galaxy mass, absolute luminosity, redshift, distance, age, and star formation rate. The present paper proposes a sonification for the mentioned dataset, with the following goals: i) providing a general description of the dataset, accessible via sound, which could also make unnoticed patterns emerge; ii) realizing an artistic but scientifically accurate sonic portrait of a portion of the universe, thus filling the gap between art and science in the context of scientific dissemination and so-called “edutainment”; iii) adding value to the dataset, since also scientific data and achievements must be considered as a cultural heritage that needs to be preserved and enhanced. Both scientific and technological aspects of the sonification are addressed.

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S. Bardelli, C. Ferretti, L. Ludovico, et. al.
Mon, 14 Feb 22
4/55

Comments: 18 pages, 6 figures

Well-being in French Astrophysics [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01768


It has become clear that early career astrophysics researchers (doctoral researchers, post-docs, etc) have a very diverse appreciation of their career, with some declaring it the best job that you can have and others suffering from overwork, harrassment and stress from the precarity of their job, and associated difficulties. In order to establish how astrophysics researchers, primarily in France, experience their career, we sent out a survey to understand the impact that their job has on their well-being. 276 people responded to the survey. Whilst around half of the respondents expressed pleasure derived from their career, it is clear that many (early career) researchers are suffering due to overwork, with more than a quarter saying that they work in excess of 50 hours per week and 2\% in excess of 90 h per week. Almost 30\% professed to having suffered harrassment or discrimination in the course of their work. Further, whilst only 20\% had suffered mental health issues before starting their career in astrophysics, $\sim$45\% said that they suffered with mental health problems since starting in astrophysics. Here we provide results from the survey as well as possible avenues to explore and a list of recommendations to improve (early) careers in astrophysics.

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N. Webb, C. Bot, S. Charpinet, et. al.
Fri, 4 Feb 22
48/65

Comments: 6 page conference proceedings on well-being in French astrophysics

Don't Forget To Look Up [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10663


We discuss a hypothetical existential threat from a 10 km diameter comet discovered 6 months prior to impact. We show that an extension of our work on bolide fragmentation using an array of penetrators, but modified with small nuclear explosive devices (NED) in the penetrators, combined with soon-to-be-realized heavy lift launch assets with positive $C_3$ such as NASA SLS or SpaceX Starship (with in-orbit refueling) is sufficient to mitigate this existential threat. A threat of this magnitude hitting the Earth at a closing speed of 40 km/s would have an impact energy of roughly 300 Teratons TNT, or about 40 thousand times larger than the current combined nuclear arsenal of the entire world. This is similar in energy to the KT extinction event that killed the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. Such an event, if not mitigated, would be an existential threat to humanity. We show that mitigation is conceivable using existing technology, even with the short time scale of 6 months warning, but that the efficient coupling of the NED energy is critical.

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P. Lubin and A. Cohen
Thu, 27 Jan 22
33/44

Comments: 15 pages, 8 figures

Towards a Democratic University: A call for Reflexive Evaluation and a Participative Culture [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2112.08963


The extensive focus on performance indicators in research evaluation has been facing critique in science studies. Stemming from a neoliberalist paradigm, metrics allegedly objectify and create certainty about researchers’ performance. This has created a publish-or-perish culture where deviant behaviour, such as research misconduct, may have become the rule of the game. Not only does this culture foster a decrease of scientists’ well-being, but also a decrease in research quality. In recent years, calls for a culture change have accumulated, from discussing detrimental cultural aspects under IchbinHannah to studies that demonstrate the connection between research culture and research integrity. This study is a qualitative analysis of how astronomers reimagine their research culture. This includes alternative output formats, alternative evaluation criteria and how they aspire to do research differently. In summary, we find that the time is ripe for a transformation in research culture towards a more participative and diverse work environment. This may include the use of an open knowledge management infrastructure, where all sorts of research output of various stages can be stored and shared. Moreover, through a more reflexive evaluation, which is continuously adapted to the needs of the researchers, scientific quality may be encouraged, rather than producing more and more publications. This study sets the basis for future action research with the aim of transforming academic cultures towards more participative ones, where scientists can let their creative minds thrive and collaborate beyond disciplinary boundaries.

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J. Heuritsch
Fri, 17 Dec 21
35/72

Comments: Keywords: reflexive evaluation, participative leadership, deliberative democracy, diversity, experimentation, ambiguity, action research, evaluative inquiry

Painting Asteroids for Planetary Defense [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03501


Asteroidal impact threats to the Earth will be predicted a century or more in advance. Changing an asteroid’s albedo changes the force of Solar radiation on it, and hence its orbit. Albedo may be changed by applying a thin ($\sim 0.1\,\mu$) reflective coat of alkali metal, dispensed as vapor by an orbiting spacecraft. A complete coat reduces the effective Solar gravity, changing the orbital period. A Tunguska-class (50 m diameter) asteroid in a nominal orbit with perihelion 1 AU and aphelion 3 AU ($a = 2\,$AU, $e = 0.5$) may be displaced along its path by $\sim 1000\,$km in 100 years, sufficient to avoid impact in a populated area, by application of one kg of lithium or sodium metal over its entire surface. Alternatively, coating one hemisphere of an asteroid in an elliptical orbit may produce a Solar radiation torque, analogous to but distinct from the Yarkovsky effect, displacing it by an Earth radius in $\sim 200$ years. The time required scales as the square root of the asteroid’s diameter (the 1/6 power of its mass) because the displacement increases quadratically with time, making it possible to prevent the catastrophic impact of a km-sized asteroid with a minimal mass.

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J. Katz
Wed, 8 Dec 21
69/77

Comments: 20 pp

Audio Universe Tour of the Solar System: using sound to make the Universe more accessible [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02110


We have created a show about the Solar System, freely available for both planetariums and home viewing, where objects in space are represented with sound as well as with visuals. For example, the audience listens to the stars appear above the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and they hear the planets orbit around their heads. The aim of this show is that it can be enjoyed and understood, irrespective of level of vision. Here we describe how we used our new computer code, STRAUSS, to convert data into sound for the show. We also discuss the lessons learnt during the design of the show, including how it was imperative to obtain a range of diverse perspectives from scientists, a composer and representatives of the blind and vision impaired community.

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C. Harrison, J. Trayford, L. Harrison, et. al.
Tue, 7 Dec 21
76/91

Comments: Visit www.audiouniverse.org for audio-visual resources. Our new sonification code, STRAUSS, is available at: this https URL Article is 5 pages with 3 figures

Introducing ASTROMOVES [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03090


The ASTROMOVES project studies the career moves and the career decision-making of astrophysicists. The astrophysicists participating have to have made at least two career moves after receiving their doctorates, which is usually between 4 and 8 years post PhD. ASTROMOVES is funded via the European Union and thus each participant must have worked or lived in Europe. Gender, ethnicity, nationality, marital status, and if they have children are some of the many factors for analysis. Other studies of the careers of astronomers and astrophysicists have taken survey approaches (Fohlmeister & Helling, 2012, 2014; Ivie et al., 2013; Ivie & White, 2015) laying a foundation upon which ASTROMOVES builds. For ASTROMOVES qualitative interviews are combined with publicly available information for the project, rather than surveys. Valuable information about career options and the decisions about where not to apply will be gathered for the first time. Those few studies that have used qualitative interviews often include both physicists and astrophysicists, nonetheless they have revealed issues that are important to ASTROMOVES such as the role of activism and the nuances of having children related to the long work hours culture (Ong, 2001; Rolin & Vainio, 2011). The global COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down the project; however, at the time of this writing 20 interviews have been completed. These interviews support previous research findings on how having a family plays an important role in career decision making, as well as the importance of mobility in building a career in astrophysics. Cultural Astronomy spans all aspects of the relationship between humans and the sky as well as all times ancient to the present; and thus, studying astronomers & astrophysicists who have a professional relationship to the sky is part of cultural astronomy, too.

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J. Holbrook
Tue, 7 Dec 21
84/91

Comments: 6 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, SEAC conference 2021

Reflecting on Motivations: How Reasons to Publish affect Research Behaviour in Astronomy [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15532


Recent research in the field of reflexive metrics have studied the emergence and consequences of evaluation gaps in science. The concept of evaluation gaps captures potential discrepancies between what researchers value about their research, in particular research quality, and what metrics measure. As a result, scientists may experience anomie and adopt innovative ways to cope. These often value quantity over quality and may even compromise research integrity. A consequence of such gaps may therefore be research misconduct and a decrease in research quality. In the language of rational choice theory, an evaluation gap persists if motivational factors arising out of the internal component of an actors situation are incongruent with those arising out of the external components. The aim of this research is therefore to study and compare autonomous and controlled motivations to become an astronomer, to do research in astronomy and to publish scientific papers. Moreover, we study how these different motivational factors affect publication pressure, the experience of organisational justice and the observation of research misconduct. In summary, we find evidence for an evaluation gap and that controlled motivational factors arising from evaluation procedures based on publication record drives up publication pressure, which, in turn, was found to increase the likelihood of perceived frequency of misbehaviour.

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J. Heuritsch
Wed, 1 Dec 21
91/110

Comments: Keywords: Reflexive Metrics, Research Behaviour, Autonomous Motivation, Controlled Motivation, Evaluation Gap

From impact refugees to deterritorialized states: foresighting extreme legal-policy cases in asteroid impact scenarios [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13643


Throughout recorded history, humans have crossed national borders to seek safety in nearby countries. The reasons for displacement have been generated by phenomena of terrestrial origin, but exposure to unexpected extra-terrestrial threats poses a different scenario. An asteroid impact warning implies a change of paradigm which would represent a historic precedent. In this regard, the analogies with natural disasters must be considered, along with multiple possible scenarios, and legal aspects related to a) the legal framework to regulate this situation; b) the action and responsibility of the states; and c) the definition of impact refugee and the reconfiguration of traditional concepts such as deterritorialized states. In addition, the decision-making process and the actors involved must be led by a cooperative effort to improve international law. These new circumstances should be established with a consideration of inequalities between the states, and an aim of protecting humanity through democratic solutions using the safest, most effective techniques.

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E. Simó-Soler and E. Peña-Asensio
Mon, 29 Nov 21
62/94

Comments: Acta Astronautica (in revision)

Citation method, please? A case study in astrophysics [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12574


Software citation has accelerated in astrophysics in the past decade, resulting in the field now having multiple trackable ways to cite computational methods. Yet most software authors do not specify how they would like their code to be cited, while others specify a citation method that is not easily tracked (or tracked at all) by most indexers. Two metadata file formats, codemeta.json and CITATION.cff, developed in 2016 and 2017 respectively, are useful for specifying how software should be cited. In 2020, the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) undertook a year-long effort to generate and send these software metadata files, specific to each computational method, to code authors for editing and inclusion on their code sites. We wanted to answer the question, “Would sending these files to software authors increase adoption of one, the other, or both of these metadata files?” The answer in this case was no. Furthermore, only 41% of the 135 code sites examined for use of these files had citation information in any form available. The lack of such information creates an obstacle for article authors to provide credit to software creators, thus hindering citation of and recognition for computational contributions to research and the scientists who develop and maintain software.

Read this paper on arXiv…

A. Allen
Thu, 25 Nov 21
58/60

Comments: 11 pages, 6 figures, 1 table

Citation method, please? A case study in astrophysics [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12574


Software citation has accelerated in astrophysics in the past decade, resulting in the field now having multiple trackable ways to cite computational methods. Yet most software authors do not specify how they would like their code to be cited, while others specify a citation method that is not easily tracked (or tracked at all) by most indexers. Two metadata file formats, codemeta.json and CITATION.cff, developed in 2016 and 2017 respectively, are useful for specifying how software should be cited. In 2020, the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) undertook a year-long effort to generate and send these software metadata files, specific to each computational method, to code authors for editing and inclusion on their code sites. We wanted to answer the question, “Would sending these files to software authors increase adoption of one, the other, or both of these metadata files?” The answer in this case was no. Furthermore, only 41% of the 135 code sites examined for use of these files had citation information in any form available. The lack of such information creates an obstacle for article authors to provide credit to software creators, thus hindering citation of and recognition for computational contributions to research and the scientists who develop and maintain software.

Read this paper on arXiv…

A. Allen
Thu, 25 Nov 21
59/60

Comments: 11 pages, 6 figures, 1 table

Can Satellite Mega-Constellations Justify Their Impact On Astronomy? [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.04592


Near-earth space is being increasingly commercialised by private space companies. This has many consequences for science, particularly, astronomy. Some estimates show that more than 100,000 satellites may orbit the Earth by 2030. Satellite mega-constellations for satellite Internet connectivity are one of the main drivers behind the explosion in the number of satellites. Here, we note whether such satellite mega-constellations can justify their impact on astronomy.

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S. Petchetti
Tue, 9 Nov 21
18/102

Comments: 2 pages. Refereed and accepted for publication in Observatory

Cyber-Cosmos: A New Citizen Science Concept in A Dark Sky Destination [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03458


Astrotourism and related citizen science activities are becoming a major trend of a sustainable, high-quality tourism segment, core elements to the protection of Dark skies in many countries. In the Summer of 2020, in the middle of COVID pandemics, we started an initiative to train young students – Cyber-Cosmos – using an Unistellar eVscope, a smart, compact and user-friendly digital telescope that offers unprecedented opportunities for deep-sky observation and citizen science campaigns. Sponsored by the Ci\^encia Viva Summer program, this was probably the first continuous application of this equipment in a pedagogical and citizen-science context, and in a pandemic context. Pampilhosa da Serra, home to a certified Dark Sky destination (Aldeias do Xisto) in central Portugal, was the chosen location for this project, where we expect astrotourism and citizen science to flourish and contribute to space sciences education.

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D. Barbosa, B. Coelho, M. Bergano, et. al.
Mon, 8 Nov 21
29/69

Comments: Manuscript presented at the International Astronautical Congress, IAC 2021, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 25 – 29 October 2021. Copyright by IAF

PI — Terminal Planetary Defense [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07559


We present a practical and effective method of planetary defense that allows for extremely short mitigation time scales. The method involves an array of small hypervelocity non-nuclear kinetic penetrators that pulverize and disassemble an asteroid or small comet. This mitigates the threat using the Earth’s atmosphere to dissipate the energy in the fragment cloud. The system allows a planetary defense solution using existing technologies. This approach will work in extended time scale modes where there is a large warning time, as well as in short interdiction time scenarios with intercepts of minutes to days before impact. In longer time intercept scenarios, the disassembled asteroid fragments largely miss the Earth. In short intercept scenarios, the asteroid fragments of maximum $\sim$10-meter diameter allow the Earth’s atmosphere to act as a “beam dump” where the fragments either burn up in the atmosphere and/or air burst, with the primary channel of energy going into spatially and temporally de-correlated shock waves. It is the de-correlated blast waves that are the key to why PI works so well. The effectiveness of the approach depends on the intercept time and size of the asteroid, but allows for effective defense against asteroids in the 20-1000m diameter class and could virtually eliminate the threat of mass destruction posed by these threats with very short warning times even in a terminal defense mode. A 20m diameter asteroid ($\sim$0.5Mt, similar to Chelyabinsk) can be mitigated with a 100s prior to impact intercept with a 10m/s disruption. With a 1m/s internal disruption, a 5 hours prior to impact intercept of a 50m diameter asteroid ($\sim$10Mt yield, similar to Tunguska), a 1 day prior to impact intercept of 100m diameter asteroid ($\sim$100Mt yield), or a 10 day prior to impact intercept of Apophis ($\sim$370m diameter, $\sim$4 Gt yield) would mitigate these threats.

Read this paper on arXiv…

P. Lubin
Fri, 15 Oct 21
15/56

Comments: 132 pages, 102 figures. To be published in Advances in Space Research (ASR)

Dodgeball — Can a Satellite Avoid Being Hit by Debris? [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03113


Can a satellite dodge a collision with untracked orbiting debris? Can a satellite dodge collision with a tracked object, making only the avoidance man{\oe}uvers actually required to avoid collision, despite the uncertainties of predicted conjunctions? Satellite-borne radar may distinguish actual collision threats from the much greater number of near misses because an object on a collision course has constant bearing, which may be determined by interferometric detection of the radar return. A large constellation of such radars may enable the determination of the ephemerides of all cm-sized debris in LEO.

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J. Katz
Fri, 8 Oct 21
41/70

Comments: 14 pp., 2 figs

Teaching relativity at the AstroCamp [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13270


The AstroCamp is an academic excellence program in the field of astronomy and physics for students in the last 3 years of pre-university education, which often includes a course (or a significant part thereof) on Relativity. After an introduction to the principles, goals and structure of the camp, I describe the approach followed by camp lecturers (myself and others) for teaching Special and General Relativity, and some lessons learned and feedback from the students. I also provide some thoughts on the differences between the physics and mathematics secondary school curricula in Portugal and in other countries, and on how these curricula could be modernized.

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C. Martins
Wed, 29 Sep 21
11/78

Comments: Summary of a talk given at the Teaching Einsteinian Physics to School Students parallel session of the Sixteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting. To appear in the proceedings

Reflexive Behaviour: How publication pressure affects research quality in Astronomy [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09375


Reflexive metrics is a branch of science studies which explores how the demand for accountability and performance measurement in science has shaped the research culture in recent decades. Hypercompetition and publication pressure are part of this neoliberal culture. How do scientists respond to these pressures? Studies on research integrity and organizational culture suggest that people who feel treated unfairly by their institution are more likely to engage in deviant behaviour, such as scientific misconduct. By building up on reflexive metrics, combined with studies on the influence of organisational culture on research integrity, this study reflects on the research behaviour of astronomers: 1) To what extent is research (mis-)behaviour reflexive, i.e. dependent on perceptions of publication pressure and distributive & organisational justice? 2) What impact does scientific misconduct have on research quality? In order to perform this reflection, we conducted a comprehensive survey of academic and non-academic astronomers worldwide and received 3,509 responses. We found that publication pressure explains 10% of the variance in occurrence of misconduct and between 7 and 13% of the variance of the perception of distributive & organisational justice as well as overcommitment to work. Our results on the perceived impact of scientific misconduct on research quality show that the epistemic harm of questionable research practices should not be underestimated. This suggests there is a need for a policy change. In particular, lesser attention to metrics (such as publication rate) in the allocation of grants, telescope time and institutional rewards would foster better scientific conduct and hence research quality.

Read this paper on arXiv…

J. Heuritsch
Tue, 21 Sep 21
56/85

Comments: N/A

Knowing when to stop [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08190


When do we stop an ongoing science project to make room for something new? Decision-making is a complex process, ranging from budgetary considerations and tension between ongoing projects, to progress assessments and allowance for novel science developments.

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O. Lahav and J. Silk
Mon, 20 Sep 21
38/53

Comments: Comment published in Nature Astronomy on 15 September 2021. Author’s version, 6 pages. See the journal’s pdf version in this https URL

Can we illuminate our cities and (still) see the stars? [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05310


Could we enjoy starry skies in our cities again? Arguably yes. The actual number of visible stars will depend, among other factors, on the spatial density of the overall city light emissions. In this paper it is shown that reasonably dark skies could be achieved in urban settings, even at the center of large metropolitan areas, if the light emissions are kept within admissible levels and direct glare from the light sources is avoided. These results may support the adoption of science-informed, democratic public decisions on the use of light in our municipalities, with the goal of recovering the possibility of contemplating the night sky everywhere in our planet.

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Bará, F. Falchi, R. Lima, et. al.
Tue, 14 Sep 21
60/88

Comments: Twelve pages, five figures. Author formatted version of a paper accepted for publication in International Journal of Sustainable Lighting (2021)

How can astrotourism serve the sustainable development goals? The Namibian example [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.04790


Astrotourism brings new opportunities to generate sustainable socio-economic development, preserve cultural heritage, and inspire and educate the citizens of the globe. This form of tourism can involve many different activities, such as visiting observatories or travelling to remote areas to experience an evening under a pristine, dark night sky. Together, our UK-Namibian collaboration is working to develop and showcase astrotourism in Namibia, and to enhance the possibility for astrotourism worldwide.

Read this paper on arXiv…

H. Dalgleish, G. Mengistie, M. Backes, et. al.
Mon, 13 Sep 21
41/52

Comments: ASP2020 Conference Proceedings; 4 pages

Enabling the sustainable space era by developing the infrastructure for a space economy [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2108.10116


The world is changing fast, and so is the space sector. Planning for large scientific experiments two decades ahead may no longer be the most sensible approach. I develop the argument that large science experiments are becoming comparable to terrestrial civil infrastructures in terms of cost. As a result, these should incorporate plans for a return on investment (or impact, not necessarily economic), require a different approach for inter-division coordination within the European Space Agency(ESA), and a broader participation of all society stakeholders (civil society representatives, and the broader public). Defining which experiments will be relevant two decades ahead adds rigidity and quenches creativity to the development of cutting edge science and technology. This is likely to discourage both senior and earlier career professionals into supporting such long-term (and often precarious) plans. A more sensible strategy would be increasing the rate of smaller well understood experiments, engage more society sectors in the development of a truly space-bound infrastructure, and formulate a strategy more in tune with the challenges faced by our society and planet. We argue that such strategy would lead to equally large — even larger — scale experiments in the same time-scale, while providing economic returns and a common sense of purpose. A basic but aggressive road map is outlined.

Read this paper on arXiv…

G. Anglada-Escudé
Tue, 24 Aug 21
36/76

Comments: Accepted for publication to EXPA (Aug 2021), 9 pages, Special Issue ESA Voyage 2050, White papers

Feasibility Study For Multiply Reusable Space Launch System [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13513


A novel concept of orbital launch system in which all stages are reusable is presented. The first two stages called Midpoint Delivery System (MPDS) deliver the next stages to a midpoint. A midpoint is defined by an altitude of 100 $km$ to 120 $km$ and horizontal velocity of 2.8 $km/s$ to 3.2 $km/s$. MPDS stages decelerate in the atmosphere and perform vertical landing on barges. These stages can be reused daily for many years. The payload is delivered from the midpoint to a 400 $km$ Low Earth Orbit by one or two stage rocket called Midpoint to Orbit Delivery System (MPTO). All of MPTO engines are delivered to LEO. These engines do not return to Earth themselves. They are returned to Earth in packs of 50 to 100 by a Reentry Vehicle. Overall, the fully and multiply reusable launch system should deliver payload to LEO for \$300 to \$400 per $kg$

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Shubov
Thu, 29 Jul 21
32/59

Comments: N/A

Implications of a search for intergalactic civilizations on prior estimates of human survival and travel speed [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.13348


We present a model where some proportion of extraterrestrial civilizations expand uniformly over time to reach a cosmological scale. We then ask what humanity could infer if a sky survey were to find zero, one, or more such civilizations. We show how the results of this survey, in combination with an approach to anthropics called the Self Indication Assumption (SIA), would shift any prior estimates of two quantities: 1) The chance that a technological civilization like ours survives to embark on such expansion, and 2) the maximum feasible speed at which it could expand. The SIA gives pessimistic estimates for both, but survey results (even null results) can reverse some of the effect.

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Olson and T. Ord
Mon, 28 Jun 21
47/51

Comments: 8 pages, 1 figure

Communicating astronomy with the public: perspectives of an international community of practice [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04616


Communities of practice in science communication can make important contributions to public engagement with science but are under-researched. In this article, we look at the perspectives of a community of practice in astronomy communication regarding (relations with) their public(s). Most participants in this study consider that public(s) have several deficits and vulnerabilities. Moreover, practitioners have little to no contact with (and therefore make no use of) academic research on science communication. We argue that collaboration between science communication researchers and practitioners could benefit the science-public relationship and that communities of practice may be critical to that purpose.

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Anjos, P. Russo and A. Carvalho
Thu, 10 Jun 21
41/77

Comments: 20 pages. Published

Indigenous rights, peoples, and space exploration: A response to the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) Consulting Canadians on a framework for future space exploration activities [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07118


Canada is beginning to plan its next chapter of space exploration that includes sending humans back to the Moon and onwards to Mars. This includes understanding humanities place in space and who will benefit from our exploration. As part of this plan the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) placed a call for consultations. In response, we presented comments urging the CSA to be inclusive of Indigenous peoples in the planning as well as to be inclusive of Indigenous rights and worldview in the future of space exploration. In particular, we explore the questions of how Outer Space Laws intersect with treaties between Indigenous Nations and the Crown in what is today Canada, how the current narratives of space exploration parallel the historic narratives of colonization that negatively impact Indigenous peoples, and how the future of commercial exploitation of outer space acts to further colonization.

Read this paper on arXiv…

H. Neilson and E. Ćirković
Fri, 16 Apr 2021
1/58

Comments: 7 pages, comments submitted to the Canadian Space Agency call “Consulting Canadians on a framework for future space exploration activities”

ASTROMOVES: Astrophysics, Diversity, Mobility [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10826


The US astronomy/astrophysics community comes together to create a decadal report that summarizes grant funding priorities, observatory & instrumental priorities as well as community accomplishments and community goals such as increasing the number of women and the number of people from underrepresented groups. In the 2010 US National Academies Decadal Survey of Astronomy (National Research Council, 2010), it was suggested that having to move so frequently which is a career necessity may be unattractive to people wanting to start a family, especially impacting women. Whether in Europe or elsewhere, as postdocs, astrophysicists will relocate every two to three years, until they secure a permanent position or leave research altogether. Astrophysicists do perceive working abroad as important and positive for their careers (Parenti, 2002); however, it was found that the men at equal rank had not had to spend as much time abroad to further their careers (Fohlmeister & Helling, 2012). By implication, women need to work abroad longer or have more positions abroad to achieve the same rank as men. Astrophysicists living in the United Kingdom prefer to work in their country of origin, but many did not do so because of worse working conditions or difficultly finding a job for their spouse (Fohlmeister & Helling, 2014). In sum, mobility and moving is necessary for a career in astrophysics, and even more necessary for women, but astrophysicists prefer not to move as frequently as needed to maintain a research career. To gather more data on these issues and to broaden the discourse beyond male/female to include the gender diverse as well as to include other forms of diversity, I designed the ASTROMOVES project which is funded through a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship. Though slowed down by COVID-19, several interviews have been conducted and some preliminary results will be presented.

Read this paper on arXiv…

J. Holbrook
Wed, 27 Jan 21
16/68

Comments: 9 pages

The AstroCamp Project [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03587


This contribution describes the concept, main structure and goals, and some highlighted outcomes, of the AstroCamp — an international academic excellence program in the field of astronomy and physics created in 2012 and organized by Centro de Astrof\'{\i}sica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP) together with the Paredes de Coura municipality and several national and international partners.

Read this paper on arXiv…

C. Martins
Tue, 12 Jan 21
56/90

Comments: To appear in the Proceedings of IAU Symposium 367

The Evaluation Gap in Astronomy — Explained through a Rational Choice Framework [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03068


The concept of evaluation gaps captures potential discrepancies between what researchers value about their research, in particular research quality, and what metrics measure. The existence of evaluation gaps can give rise to questions about the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to perform research, i.e. how field-specific notions of quality compete with notions captured via evaluation metrics, and consequently how researchers manage the balancing act between intrinsic values and requirements of evaluation procedures. This study analyses the evaluation gap from a rational choice point of view for the case of observational astronomers, based on a literature review and 19 semi-structured interviews with international astronomers. By taking a close look at the role of institutional norms and different forms of capital – such as funding, publication rates and granted telescope time – at play in astronomy, light can be shed on the workings of the balance act and its consequences on research quality in astronomy. We find that astronomers experience an anomie; they want to follow their intrinsic motivation to pursue science in order to push knowledge forward, while at the same time following their extrinsic motivation to comply with institutional norms. The balance act is the art of serving performance indicators in order to stay in academia, while at the same time compromising research quality as little as possible. Gaming strategies shall give the appearance of compliance, while institutionalised means how to achieve a good bibliometric record are used in innovative ways, such as salami slicing or going for easy publications. This leads to an overall decrease in research quality.

Read this paper on arXiv…

J. Heuritsch
Mon, 11 Jan 21
17/65

Comments: This is a Preprint written in the context of science studies. The author is a member of the “Reflexive Metrics” junior research group (this https URL)

Gender Imbalance and Spatiotemporal Patterns of Contributions to Citizen Science Projects: the case of Zooniverse [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02695


Citizen Science is research undertaken by professional scientists and members of the public collaboratively. Despite numerous benefits of citizen science for both the advancement of science and the community of the citizen scientists, there is still no comprehensive knowledge of patterns of contributions, and the demography of contributors to citizen science projects. In this paper we provide a first overview of spatiotemporal and gender distribution of citizen science workforce by analyzing 54 million classifications contributed by more than 340 thousand citizen science volunteers from 198 countries to one of the largest citizen science platforms, Zooniverse. First we report on the uneven geographical distribution of the citizen scientist and model the variations among countries based on the socio-economic conditions as well as the level of research investment in each country. Analyzing the temporal features of contributions, we report on high “burstiness” of participation instances as well as the leisurely nature of participation suggested by the time of the day that the citizen scientists were the most active. Finally, we discuss the gender imbalance among citizen scientists (about 30% female) and compare it with other collaborative projects as well as the gender distribution in more formal scientific activities. Citizen science projects need further attention from outside of the academic community, and our findings can help attract the attention of public and private stakeholders, as well as to inform the design of the platforms and science policy making processes.

Read this paper on arXiv…

K. Ibrahim, S. Khodursky and T. Yasseri
Fri, 8 Jan 21
22/48

Comments: Under Review

Carbon Footprint Study for the GRAND Project [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02049


We present a pioneering estimate of the global yearly greenhouse gas emissions of a large-scale Astrophysics experiment over several decades: the Giant Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND). The project aims at detecting ultra-high energy neutrinos with a 200,000 radio antenna array over 200,000\,km$^2$ as of the 2030s. With a fully transparent methodology based on open source data, we calculate the emissions related to three unavoidable sources: travel, digital technologies and hardware equipment. We find that these emission sources have a different impact depending on the stages of the experiment. Digital technologies and travel prevail for the small-scale prototyping phase (GRANDProto300), whereas hardware equipment (material production and transportation) and data transfer/storage largely outweigh the other emission sources in the large-scale phase (GRAND200k). In the mid-scale phase (GRAND10k), the three sources contribute equally. This study highlights the considerable carbon footprint of a large-scale astrophysics experiment, but also shows that there is room for improvement. We discuss various lines of actions that could be implemented. The GRAND project being still in its prototyping stage, our results provide guidance to the future collaborative practices and instrumental design in order to reduce its carbon footprint.

Read this paper on arXiv…

C. Aujoux, K. Kotera and O. Blanchard
Thu, 7 Jan 21
51/58

Comments: 20 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables

Women in academia: a warning on selection bias in gender studies from the astronomical perspective [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09784


The recent paper by AlShebli et al. (2020) investigates the impact of mentorship in young scientists. Among their conclusions, they state that female prot\’eg\’es benefit more from male than female mentorship. We herein expose a critical flaw in their methodological design that is a common issue in Astronomy, namely “selection biases”. An effect that if not treated properly may lead to unwarranted causality claims. In their analysis, selection biases seem to be present in the response rate of their survey (8.35%), the choice of database, success criterion, and the overlook of the numerous drawbacks female researchers face in academia. We discuss these issues and their implications — one of them being the potential increase in obstacles for women in academia. Finally, we reinforce the dangers of not considering selection bias effects in studies aimed at retrieving causal relations.

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Dantas, E. Cameron, R. Souza, et. al.
Fri, 18 Dec 20
12/78

Comments: Submitted to Nature Communications on Nov. 27 — comments are welcome

Second Order Operators in the NASA Astrophysics Data System [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.01418


Second Order Operators (SOOs) are database functions which form secondary queries based on attributes of the objects returned in an initial query; they can provide powerful methods to investigate complex, multipartite information graphs. The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) has implemented four SOOs, reviews, useful, trending, and similar which use the citations, references, downloads, and abstract text.
This tutorial describes these operators in detail, both alone and in conjunction with other functions. It is intended for scientists and others who wish to make fuller use of the ADS database. Basic knowledge of the ADS is assumed.

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Kurtz and R. Chyla
Tue, 6 Oct 2020
19/85

Comments: ADS Bibcode:2020BAAS…52b0207K, author’s version

An astronomical institute's perspective on meeting the challenges of the climate crisis [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11307


Analysing greenhouse gas emissions of an astronomical institute is a first step in reducing its environmental impact. Here, we break down the emissions of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and propose measures for reductions.

Read this paper on arXiv…

K. Jahnke, C. Fendt, M. Fouesneau, et. al.
Fri, 25 Sep 20
-1845/62

Comments: Originated at EAS 2020 conference, sustainability session by this https URL – published in Nature Astronomy, September 2020

The carbon footprint of large astronomy meetings [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11344


The annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society took place in Lyon, France, in 2019, but in 2020 it was held online only due the COVID-19 pandemic. The carbon footprint of the virtual meeting was roughly 3,000 times smaller than the face-to-face one, providing encouragement for more ecologically minded conferencing.

Read this paper on arXiv…

L. Burtscher, D. Barret, A. Borkar, et. al.
Fri, 25 Sep 20
-1833/62

Comments: Originated in a Twitter discussion (this https URL) at EWASS 2019; followed up at the EAS 2020 conference sustainability session by this https URL – published in Nature Astronomy, September 2020

The impact of climate change on astronomical observations [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11779


Climate change is affecting and will increasingly affect astronomical observations. In this paper, we investigated the role some key weather parameters play in the quality of astronomical observations, and analysed their long-term trends (longer than 30 years) in order to grasp the impact of climate change on current and future observations. In this preliminary study, we specifically analysed four parameters, the temperature, the surface layer turbulence, the wind speed at the jetstream layer and the humidity. The analyses is conducted with data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT), operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), located at Cerro Paranal in the Atacama desert, Chile, which is one of the driest places on Earth. To complete the data from the various sensors installed at Paranal, we used the fifth generation and 20th century European Centre Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate, ERA5 (from 1980 to now) and ERA20C (from 1900 to 2010), which we interpolated at the Paranal observatory location. In addition, we also explored climate projections in this region, using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) multi-model ensemble, under the worst-case climate change Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSP5-8.5) scenario. Further investigation is needed to better understand the underlying mechanisms of change, as well as to assess the severity of the impact.

Read this paper on arXiv…

F. Cantalloube, J. Milli, C. Böhm, et. al.
Fri, 25 Sep 20
-1815/62

Comments: Originated at EAS 2020 conference, sustainability session by this https URL – published in Nature Astronomy, September 2020. Free access this https URL (courtesy of Nature Astronomy)

The decline of astronomical research in Venezuela [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2008.04595


During the last 15 years the number of astronomy-related papers published by scientists in Venezuela has been continuously decreasing, mainly due to emigration. If rapid corrective actions are not implemented, Venezuelan astronomy could disappear.

Read this paper on arXiv…

N. Sanchez
Wed, 12 Aug 20
-864/63

Comments: 7 pages including 1 table and 2 figures. Comment published on Nature Astronomy. This is the author version, the published version is available at the Shareedit link this https URL

Light pollution in USA and Europe: The good, the bad and the ugly [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01150


Light pollution is a worldwide problem that has a range of adverse effects on human health and natural ecosystems. Using data from the New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness, VIIRS-recorded radiance and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data, we compared light pollution levels, and the light flux to the population size and GDP at the State and County levels in the USA and at Regional (NUTS2) and Province (NUTS3) levels in Europe. We found 6800-fold differences between the most and least polluted regions in Europe, 120-fold differences in their light flux per capita, and 267-fold differences in flux per GDP unit. Yet, we found even greater differences between US counties: 200,000-fold differences in sky pollution, 16,000-fold differences in light flux per capita, and 40,000-fold differences in light flux per GDP unit. These findings may inform policy-makers, helping to reduce energy waste and adverse environmental, cultural and health consequences associated with light pollution.

Read this paper on arXiv…

F. Falchi, R. Furgoni, T. Gallaway, et. al.
Fri, 3 Jul 20
47/57

Comments: N/A

Toward an atlas of the number of visible stars [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00354


Modelling techniques for the propagation of light pollution in the atmosphere allow the computation of maps of artificial night sky brightness in any direction of the sky, involving a large number of details from satellite data. Cinzano et al. (2001a) introduced a method of mapping naked eye star visibility at the zenith from large areas based on satellite radiance measurements and Garstang models of the propagation of light pollution. It takes into account the altitude of each land area from digital elevation data, natural sky brightness in the chosen sky direction based on the Garstang approach, eye capability after Garstang and Schaefer, and atmospheric extinction in the visual photometric band. Here we discuss how to use these methods to obtain maps of the average number of visible stars when looking at the night sky hemisphere, finally answering, site by site, the question of how many stars are visible in the sky. This is not trivial, as the number of stars visible depends on the limiting magnitude in each direction in the sky, and this depends on sky brightness in that direction, atmospheric extinction at that zenith distance and the observer’s visual acuity and experience. We present, as an example, a map of the number of visible stars in Italy to an average observer on clear nights with a resolution of approximately 1 km.

Read this paper on arXiv…

P. Cinzano and F. Falchi
Thu, 2 Jul 20
42/64

Comments: N/A

Distributed peer review enhanced with natural language processing and machine learning [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04165


While ancient scientists often had patrons to fund their work, peer review of proposals for the allocation of resources is a foundation of modern science. A very common method is that proposals are evaluated by a small panel of experts (due to logistics and funding limitations) nominated by the grant-giving institutions. The expert panel process introduces several issues – most notably: 1) biases introduced in the selection of the panel. 2) experts have to read a very large number of proposals. Distributed Peer Review promises to alleviate several of the described problems by distributing the task of reviewing among the proposers. Each proposer is given a limited number of proposals to review and rank. We present the result of an experiment running a machine-learning enhanced distributed peer review process for allocation of telescope time at the European Southern Observatory. In this work, we show that the distributed peer review is statistically the same as a `traditional’ panel, that our machine learning algorithm can predict expertise of reviewers with a high success rate, and we find that seniority and reviewer expertise have an influence on review quality. The general experience has been overwhelmingly praised from the participating community (using an anonymous feedback mechanism).

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W. Kerzendorf, F. Patat, D. Bordelon, et. al.
Fri, 10 Apr 20
19/56

Comments: 20 pages including supplementary information. Constructive criticism more than welcome. Accepted and published in Nature Astronomy

Urban Planning in the First Unfortified Spanish Colonial Town: The orientation of the historic churches of San Cristobal de La Laguna [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12410


The city of San Cristobal de La Laguna in the Canary Island of Tenerife (Spain) has an exceptional value due to the original conception of its plan. It is an urban system in a grid, outlined by straight streets that form squares, its layout being the first case of an unfortified colonial city with a regular plan in the overseas European expansion. It constitutes a historical example of the so-called “Town of Peace”, the archetype of a city-republic in a new land that employed its own natural boundaries to delimit and defend itself. Founded in 1496, the historical centre of the old city was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999. We analyse the exact spatial orientation of twenty-one historic Christian churches currently existing in the old part of La Laguna which we take as a good indicator of the original layout of the urban lattice. We find a clear orientation pattern that, if correlated with the rising or setting Sun, singles out an absolute-value astronomical declination slightly below 20 degrees, which, within the margin of error of our study, might be associated with the July 25th feast-day of San Cristobal de Licia, the saint to whom the town was originally dedicated. We also discuss at some length some recent proposals which invoke somewhat far-fetched hypotheses for the planimetry of the old city and finish up with some comments on one of its outstanding features, namely its Latin-cross structure, which is apparent in the combined layout of some of its most emblematic churches.

Read this paper on arXiv…

A. Gangui and J. Belmonte
Mon, 30 Mar 20
41/44

Comments: PDF document including 1 table and 8 figures

A Dynamical Systems Description of Privilege, Power and Leadership in Academia: identifying barriers and paths to inclusive communities of excellent scholarship [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06605


As the diversity of people in higher education grows, Universities are struggling to provide inclusive environments that nurture the spirit of free inquiry in the presence of these differences. At the extreme, the value of diversity is under attack as a few, vocal academics use public forums to question the innate intellectual abilities of certain demographic groups. Throughout my career as an astronomer, from graduate student, through professor to department chair, I have witnessed these struggles firsthand. Exclusive cultures result in lost opportunities in the form of unfulfilled potential of all members of the institution – students, administrators and faculty alike. How to move steadily towards inclusion is an unsolved problem that hampers the advancement of knowledge itself. As every scientist knows, problem definition is an essential feature of problem solution. This article draws on insights from dynamical systems descriptions of conflict developed in the social and behavioral sciences to present a model that captures the convoluted, interacting challenges that stifle progress on this problem. This description of complexity explains the persistence of exclusive cultures and the inadequacy of quick or simple fixes. It also motivates the necessity of prolonged and multifaceted approaches to solutions. It is incumbent on our faculties to recognize the complexities in both problem and solutions, and persevere in responding to these intractable dynamics. It is incumbent on our administrations to provide the consistent structure that supports these tasks. It incumbent on all of our constituents – students, administration and faculty – to be cognizant of and responsive to these efforts.

Read this paper on arXiv…

K. Johnston
Mon, 16 Dec 19
52/62

Comments: Strongly recommend reading the formatted version available at this https URL

Opportunities and Outcomes for Postdocs in Canada [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.10320


Currently, postdoctoral fellow (PDF) researchers in Canada face challenges due to the precarious nature of their employment and their overall low compensation and benefits coverage. This report presents three themes, written as statements of need, to support an inclusive and thriving PDF community. These themes are the need for better terms of employment and conditions, the need for access to grants by non-permanent research staff, and the need for a sustainable PDF hiring model that considers the outcomes for the PDFs.
We make six recommendations:
R1. PDFs should be hired and compensated as skilled experts in their areas, not as trainees.
R2. Standard PDF hiring practices should be revised to be more inclusive of different life circumstances.
– R2.1 Allow PDFs the option of part-time employment.
– R2.2 Remove years-since-PhD time limits from PDF jobs.
– R2.3 Financially support PDF hires for relocation and visa expenses.
R3. CASCA should form a committee to advocate for and provide support to astronomy PDFs in Canada.
R4. CASCA should encourage universities to create offices dedicated to their PDFs.
R5. PDFs and other PhD-holding term researchers with a host institution should be able to compete for and win grants to self-fund their own research.
R6. Astronomy in Canada should hire general-purpose continuing support scientist positions instead of term PDFs to fill project or mission-specific requirements.
In short, we ask for prioritization of people over production of papers.

Read this paper on arXiv…

H. Ngo, H. Kirk, T. Brown, et. al.
Tue, 26 Nov 19
62/66

Comments: State of the profession white paper submitted to the Canadian Long Range Plan 2020 decadal survey with appendices

Response to NITRD, NCO, NSF Request for Information on "Update to the 2016 National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan" [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05796


We present a response to the 2018 Request for Information (RFI) from the NITRD, NCO, NSF regarding the “Update to the 2016 National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan.” Through this document, we provide a response to the question of whether and how the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan (NAIRDSP) should be updated from the perspective of Fermilab, America’s premier national laboratory for High Energy Physics (HEP). We believe the NAIRDSP should be extended in light of the rapid pace of development and innovation in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) since 2016, and present our recommendations below. AI has profoundly impacted many areas of human life, promising to dramatically reshape society — e.g., economy, education, science — in the coming years. We are still early in this process. It is critical to invest now in this technology to ensure it is safe and deployed ethically. Science and society both have a strong need for accuracy, efficiency, transparency, and accountability in algorithms, making investments in scientific AI particularly valuable. Thus far the US has been a leader in AI technologies, and we believe as a national Laboratory it is crucial to help maintain and extend this leadership. Moreover, investments in AI will be important for maintaining US leadership in the physical sciences.

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J. Amundson, J. Annis, C. Avestruz, et. al.
Fri, 15 Nov 19
30/73

Comments: N/A

Canadian Astronomy on Maunakea: On Respecting Indigenous Rights [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.03665


(Abridged) Canadian astronomy has, for decades, benefited from access to observatories and participating in international consortia on one of the best astronomical sites in the world: Maunakea. However, Maunakea is part of the unceded territory of the Native Hawaiian peoples and has always been of special significance to Hawaiian culture. The use of the summit and its science reserve has created tensions in the past decade, particularly with the development of the Thirty Meter Telescope. A meaningful and respectful response from the International astronomy community is still lacking. It is expected that the LRP 2020 will continue to support Canadian astronomy on Maunakea so a better official statement on the position and involvement of CASCA should be prepared. In this paper we present recommendations, based on the United Nation Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for the Canadian astronomical community to better support Indigenous rights on Maunakea and Hawaii while providing clear guidelines for the astronomical community to participate in activities conducted on Indigenous land. This framework is designed to motivate conversations with Indigenous communities regarding our place on Indigenous lands and our roles, and responsibilities toward the communities we are working with. Furthermore, we propose this framework as a basis for engaging with communities around the world regarding consent for astronomical facilities.

Read this paper on arXiv…

H. Neilson, L. Rousseau-Nepton and S. Lawler
Thu, 10 Oct 19
1/63

Comments: 7 pages. Community paper submitted to the Canadian Long Range Plan 2020, this https URL

Systematics in the ALMA Proposal Review Rankings [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09639


The results from the ALMA proposal peer review process in Cycles 0-6 are analyzed to identify any systematics in the scientific rankings that may signify bias. Proposal rankings are analyzed with respect to the experience level of a Principal Investigator (PI) in submitting ALMA proposals, regional affiliation (Chile, East Asia, Europe, North America, or Other), and gender. The analysis was conducted for both the Stage 1 rankings, which are based on the preliminary scores from the reviewers, and the Stage 2 rankings, which are based on the final scores from the reviewers after participating in a face-to-face panel discussion. Analysis of the Stage 1 results shows that PIs who submit an ALMA proposal in multiple cycles have systematically better proposal ranks than PIs who have submitted proposals for the first time. In terms of regional affiliation, PIs from Europe and North America have better Stage 1 rankings than PIs from Chile and East Asia. Consistent with Lonsdale et al. (2016), proposals led by men have better Stage 1 rankings than women when averaged over all cycles. This trend was most noticeably present in Cycle 3, but no discernible differences in the Stage 1 rankings are present in recent cycles. Nonetheless, in each cycle to date, women have had a lower proposal acceptance rate than men even after differences in demographics are considered. Comparison of the Stage 1 and Stage 2 rankings reveal no significant changes in the distribution of proposal ranks by experience level, regional affiliation, or gender as a result of the panel discussions, although the proposal ranks for East Asian PIs show a marginally significant improvement from Stage 1 to Stage 2 when averaged over all cycles. Thus any systematics in the proposal rankings are introduced primarily in the Stage 1 process and not from the face-to-face discussions.

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J. Carpenter
Tue, 27 Aug 19
42/85

Comments: 26 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in PASP

ESA's Voyage 2050 Long-term Plan for Education and Public Engagement: White Paper [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.01546


This white paper responds to the Voyage 2050 Call for White Papers from the Science Programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) and argues that education, communication and public engagement (hereafter EPE) should have priority in the Voyage 2050 planning cycle. The ESA Science’s Voyage 2050 missions promise insights into the big existential questions of our era: the prevalence of life in the Universe; the nature of space and time; and the intertwined nature of matter, energy and gravity. It is likely that innovations in the acquisition, handling and processing of vast data sets will drive these themes to scientific maturity in the next decades. They offer us a timely opportunity to underline the relevance of space sciences to everyday life and thinking. More generally, space science is maturing to the point where it contributes to every major aspect of our cultural discourse. Citizens need information, resources and opportunities to actively participate in that discourse, and ESA Science can provide these. This white paper is a modest attempt to support ESA Science improve its engagement with society. It focuses on issues and topics to improve ESA Science’s Education and Public Engagement activities. It does not dwell on the topics that ESA already excels at; hence this White Paper provides a critical review of what should and could be improved. We believe ESA’s Voyage 2050 programme teams have a responsibility to represent Europe’s social and cultural diversity, and our suggestions are conceived in that spirit: to support ESA Science’s complex task of engaging a hugely diverse audience in the complex issues of planning, building and operating fascinating space missions.

Read this paper on arXiv…

P. Russo, &. Alwast, L. Christensen, et. al.
Tue, 6 Aug 19
51/76

Comments: 24 pages. White Paper submitted in response to ESA’s Call for Voyage 2050 Science Themes

(Un)conscious Bias in the Astronomical Profession: Universal Recommendations to improve Fairness, Inclusiveness, and Representation [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05261


(Un)conscious bias affects every aspect of the astronomical profession, from scientific activities (e.g., invitations to join collaborations, proposal selections, grant allocations, publication review processes, and invitations to attend and speak at conferences) to activities more strictly related to career advancement (e.g., reference letters, fellowships, hiring, promotion, and tenure). For many, (un)conscious bias is still the main hurdle to achieving excellence, as the most diverse talents encounter bigger challenges and difficulties to reach the same milestones than their more privileged colleagues. Over the past few years, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has constructed tools to raise awareness of (un)conscious bias and has designed guidelines and goals to increase diversity representation and outcome in its scientific activities, including career-related matters and STScI sponsored fellowships, conferences, workshops, and colloquia. STScI has also addressed (un)conscious bias in the peer-review process by anonymizing submission and evaluation of Hubble Space Telescope (and soon to be James Webb Space Telescope) observing proposals. In this white paper we present a plan to standardize these methods with the expectation that these universal recommendations will truly increase diversity, inclusiveness and fairness in Astronomy if applied consistently throughout all the scientific activities of the Astronomical community.

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A. Aloisi and N. Reid
Fri, 12 Jul 19
13/67

Comments: 13 pages, 3 figures, White Paper for Astro2020

The Nonbinary Fraction: Looking Towards the Future of Gender Equity in Astronomy [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1907.04893


Gender equity is one of the biggest issues facing the field of astrophysics, and there is broad interest in addressing gender disparities within astronomy. Many studies of these topics have been performed by professional astronomers who are relatively unfamiliar with research in fields such as gender studies and sociology. As a result, they adopt a normative view of gender as a binary choice of ‘male’ or ‘female’, leaving astronomers whose genders do not fit within that model out of such research entirely. Reductive frameworks of gender and an overemphasis on quantification as an indicator of gendered phenomena are harmful to people of marginalized genders, especially those who live at the intersections of multiple axes of marginalization such as race, disability, and socioeconomic status. In order for the astronomy community to best serve its marginalized members as we move into the next decade, a new paradigm must be developed. This paper aims to address the future of gender equity in astronomy by recommending better survey practices and institutional policies based on a more complex approach to gender.

Read this paper on arXiv…

K. Rasmussen, E. Maier, B. Strauss, et. al.
Fri, 12 Jul 19
52/67

Comments: 15 pages, 0 figures: APC white paper submitted to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey

Exoplanets and University-Industry Collaboration [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08777


A brief review is given of a university outreach programme by a commercial organisation, which uses the Kepler exoplanet data. Key insights derived from this research are presented, along with discussion of the benefi ts and challenges of such a collaboration between industry and academia. It is hoped that this account will be an inspiring example for others to emulate.

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T. Banks and E. Budding
Mon, 24 Jun 19
37/56

Comments: N/A

Gender and the Career Outcomes of PhD Astronomers in the United States [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08195


I analyze the postdoctoral career tracks of a nearly-complete sample of astronomers from 28 United States graduate astronomy and astrophysics programs spanning 13 graduating years (N=1063). A majority of both men and women (65% and 66%, respectively) find long-term employment in astronomy or closely-related academic disciplines. No significant difference is observed in the rates at which men and women are hired into these jobs following their PhDs, or in the rates at which they leave the field. Applying a two-outcome survival analysis model to the entire data set, the relative academic hiring probability ratio for women vs. men at a common year post-PhD is H_(F/M) = 1.08 (+0.20, -0.17; 95% CI); the relative leaving probability ratio is L_(F/M) = 1.03 (+0.31, -0.24). These are both consistent with equal outcomes for both genders (H_(F/M) = L_(F/M) = 1) and rule out more than minor gender differences in hiring or in the decision to abandon an academic career. They suggest that despite discrimination and adversity, women scientists are successful at managing the transition between PhD, postdoctoral, and faculty/staff positions.

Read this paper on arXiv…

D. Perley
Thu, 21 Mar 19
2/66

Comments: Accepted for publication in PASP. Motivated by the study of Flaherty (arXiv:1810.01511)

What Does a Successful Postdoctoral Fellowship Publication Record Look Like? [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1810.09505


Obtaining a prize postdoctoral fellowship in astronomy and astrophysics involves a number of factors, many of which cannot be quantified. One criterion that can be measured is the publication record of an applicant. The publication records of past fellowship recipients may, therefore, provide some quantitative guidance for future prospective applicants. We investigated the publication patterns of recipients of the NASA prize postdoctoral fellowships in the Hubble, Einstein, and Sagan programs from 2014 through 2017, using the NASA ADS reference system. We tabulated their publications at the point where fellowship applications were submitted, and we find that the 133 fellowship recipients in that time frame had a median of 6 +/- 2 first-author publications, and 14 +/- 6 co-authored publications. The full range of first author papers is 1 to 15, and for all papers ranges from 2 to 76, indicating very diverse publication patterns. Thus, while fellowship recipients generally have strong publication records, the distribution of both first-author and co-authored papers is quite broad; there is no apparent threshold of publications necessary to obtain these fellowships. We also examined the post-PhD publication rates for each of the three fellowship programs, between male and female recipients, across the four years of the analysis and find no consistent trends. We hope that these findings will prove a useful reference to future junior scientists.

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J. Pepper, O. Krupinska, K. Stassun, et. al.
Wed, 24 Oct 18
9/75

Comments: Accepted to PASP, 11 pages, 6 figures

Peer-review under review – A statistical study on proposal ranking at ESO. Part I: the pre-meeting phase [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1805.06981


Peer review is the most common mechanism in place for assessing requests for resources in a large variety of scientific disciplines. One of the strongest criticisms to this paradigm is the limited reproducibility of the process, especially at largely oversubscribed facilities. In this and in a subsequent paper we address this specific aspect in a quantitative way, through a statistical study on proposal ranking at the European Southern Observatory. For this purpose we analysed a sample of about 15000 proposals, submitted by more than 3000 Principal Investigators over 8 years. The proposals were reviewed by more than 500 referees, who assigned over 140000 grades in about 200 panel sessions. After providing a detailed analysis of the statistical properties of the sample, the paper presents an heuristic model based on these findings, which is then used to provide quantitative estimates of the reproducibility of the pre-meeting process. On average, about one third of the proposals ranked in the top quartile by one referee are ranked in the same quartile by any other referee of the panel. A similar value is observed for the bottom quartile. In the central quartiles, the agreement fractions are very marginally above the value expected for a fully aleatory process (25%). The agreement fraction between two panels composed by 6 referees is 55+/-5% (50% confidence level) for the top and bottom quartiles. The corresponding fraction for the central quartiles is 33+/-5%. The model predictions are confirmed by the results obtained from boot-strapping the data for sub-panels composed by 3 referees, and fully consistent with the NIPS experiment. The post-meeting phase will be presented and discussed in a forthcoming paper.

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F. Patat
Mon, 21 May 18
58/71

Comments: 22 pages, 18 figures. Accepted for publication in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Pacific

Merging the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Information Systems [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03598


Conceptually exoplanet research has one foot in the discipline of Astrophysics and the other foot in Planetary Science. Research strategies for exoplanets will require efficient access to data and information from both realms. Astrophysics has a sophisticated, well integrated, distributed information system with archives and data centers which are interlinked with the technical literature via the Astrophysics Data System (ADS). The information system for Planetary Science does not have a central component linking the literature with the observational and theoretical data. Here we propose that the Committee on an Exoplanet Science Strategy recommend that this linkage be built, with the ADS playing the role in Planetary Science which it already plays in Astrophysics. This will require additional resources for the ADS, and the Planetary Data System (PDS), as well as other international collaborators

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Kurtz, A. Accomazzi and E. Henneken
Mon, 12 Mar 2018
24/45

Comments: Whitepaper submitted to the Committee on an Exoplanet Science Strategy

The ESO Survey of Non-Publishing Programmes [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03272


One of the classic ways to measure the success of a scientific facility is the publication return, which is defined as the refereed papers produced per unit of allocated resources (for example, telescope time or proposals). The recent studies by Sterzik et al. (2015, 2016) have shown that 30-50 % of the programmes allocated time at ESO do not produce a refereed publication. While this may be inherent to the scientific process, this finding prompted further investigation. For this purpose, ESO conducted a Survey of Non-Publishing Programmes (SNPP) within the activities of the Time Allocation Working Group, a, similar to the monitoring campaign that was recently implemented at ALMA (Stoehr et al. 2016). The SNPP targeted 1278 programmes scheduled between ESO Periods 78 and 90 (October 2006 to March 2013) that had not published a refereed paper as of April 2016. The poll was launched on 6 May 2016, remained open for four weeks, and returned 965 valid responses. This article summarises and discusses the results of this survey, the first of its kind at ESO.

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F. Patat, H. Boffin, D. Bordelon, et. al.
Mon, 12 Feb 18
4/53

Comments: 10 pages, 4 figures, Appeared on The Messenger, 170, 51

Advice from the Oracle: Really Intelligent Information Retrieval [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00815


What is “intelligent” information retrieval? Essentially this is asking what is intelligence, in this article I will attempt to show some of the aspects of human intelligence, as related to information retrieval. I will do this by the device of a semi-imaginary Oracle. Every Observatory has an oracle, someone who is a distinguished scientist, has great administrative responsibilities, acts as mentor to a number of less senior people, and as trusted advisor to even the most accomplished scientists, and knows essentially everyone in the field. In an appendix I will present a brief summary of the Statistical Factor Space method for text indexing and retrieval, and indicate how it will be used in the Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service. 2018 Keywords: Personal Digital Assistant; Supervised Topic Models

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M. Kurtz
Thu, 4 Jan 2018
20/44

Comments: Author copy; published 25 years ago at the beginning of the Astrophysics Data System; 2018 keywords added

The Astrobiology of the Anthropocene [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00052


Human influence on the biosphere has been evident at least since the development of widespread agriculture, and some stratigraphers have suggested that the activities of modern civilization indicate a geological epoch transition. The study of the anthropocene as a geological epoch, and its implication for the future of energy-intensive civilizations, is an emerging transdisciplinary field in which astrobiology can play a leading role. Habitability research of Earth, Mars, and exoplanets examines extreme cases relevant for understanding climate change as a planetary process. Energy-intensive civilizations will also face thermodynamic limits to growth, which provides an important constraint for estimating the longevity of human civilization and guiding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We recommend that missions concepts such as LUVOIR, HabEx, and OST be pursued in order to make significant progress toward understanding the future evolution of life on our planet and the possible evolution of technological, energy-intensive life elsewhere in the universe.

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J. Haqq-Misra, S. Som, B. Mullan, et. al.
Wed, 3 Jan 2018
2/59

Comments: Comments welcome. This is a white paper on “Astrobiology Science Strategy” that will be submitted to the NAS on January 5

On the orientation of the historic churches of Lanzarote: when human necessity dominates over canonical prescriptions [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.09324


We present the analysis of the measured orientations of 30 churches of the island of Lanzarote, in the Canarian archipelago, built prior to 1810, as well as a few buildings of later times, which represent a nearly complete sample of all the island’s Christian sanctuaries. Our study indicates that a definite orientation pattern was followed on the island but, unlike what is often found in most of the Christian world, it has two interpretations. On the one hand, the representative orientation to the east (or west) is present. However, the sample has also a marked orientation towards north-northeast which is, as far as we know, a pattern exclusive to Lanzarote. We discuss the reasons for this pattern and suggest that one possible explanation could be a rather prosaic one, namely, that sometimes needs of everyday life are more relevant than –and push individuals to make decisions at odds with– religious beliefs. This work is the beginning of the first systematic archaeoastronomical study ever conducted with old churches in the Canary Islands [abridged].

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A. Gangui, A. Garcia, M. Betancort, et. al.
Wed, 27 Dec 2017
39/56

Comments: Published in The Materiality of the Sky. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual SEAC Conference, 2014, Silva, F. et al (eds.), Lampeter: Sophia Centre Press, pp. 125-134, 2016

BIOSTIRLING-4SKA : A cost effective and efficient approach for a new generation of solar dish-Stirling plants based on storage and hybridization; An Energy demo project for Large Scale Infrastructures", [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03029


The BIOSTIRLING – 4SKA (B4S) is a EU demonstration project dealing with the implementation of a cost-effective and efficient new generation of solar dish-Stirling plants based on hybridization and efficient storage at the industrial scale. The main goal of the B4S demonstration project is the generation of electric power using simultaneously solar power and gas to supply an isolated system and act as a scalable example of potential power supply for many infrastructures, including future sustainable large scientific infrastructures. B4S build an interdisciplinary approach to address reliability, maintainability and costs of this technology. In April 2017, B4S successfully tested in Portugal the first world Stirling hybrid system providing about 4kW of power to a phased array of antennas, overcoming challenges in Stirling and hybridization and smartgrid technologies. B4SKA Consortium, with fourteen companies from six European countries, has performed the engineering, construction, assembly and experimental exploitation, under contract signed with the European to develop on off-grid demonstrator in Contenda (Moura) Portugal.

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D. Barbosa, P. Andre, T. Paixao, et. al.
Mon, 11 Dec 17
60/62

Comments: 7 pages; 8 Figures; Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Integration of Solar Power into Power Systems, 2C_5_SIW17_299, Ed. Uta Betancourt, Thomas Ackermann, Berlin, Germany, 24-25th October 2017

Comparing People with Bibliometrics [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.09955


Bibliometric indicators, citation counts and/or download counts are increasingly being used to inform personnel decisions such as hiring or promotions. These statistics are very often misused. Here we provide a guide to the factors which should be considered when using these so-called quantitative measures to evaluate people. Rules of thumb are given for when begin to use bibliometric measures when comparing otherwise similar candidates.

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M. Kurtz
Tue, 1 Aug 17
34/55

Comments: to appear in Proceedings of Library and Information Science in Astronomy VIII (LISA-8)

Usage Bibliometrics as a Tool to Measure Research Activity [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.02153


Measures for research activity and impact have become an integral ingredient in the assessment of a wide range of entities (individual researchers, organizations, instruments, regions, disciplines). Traditional bibliometric indicators, like publication and citation based indicators, provide an essential part of this picture, but cannot describe the complete picture. Since reading scholarly publications is an essential part of the research life cycle, it is only natural to introduce measures for this activity in attempts to quantify the efficiency, productivity and impact of an entity. Citations and reads are significantly different signals, so taken together, they provide a more complete picture of research activity. Most scholarly publications are now accessed online, making the study of reads and their patterns possible. Click-stream logs allow us to follow information access by the entire research community, real-time. Publication and citation datasets just reflect activity by authors. In addition, download statistics will help us identify publications with significant impact, but which do not attract many citations. Click-stream signals are arguably more complex than, say, citation signals. For one, they are a superposition of different classes of readers. Systematic downloads by crawlers also contaminate the signal, as does browsing behavior. We discuss the complexities associated with clickstream data and how, with proper filtering, statistically significant relations and conclusions can be inferred from download statistics. We describe how download statistics can be used to describe research activity at different levels of aggregation, ranging from organizations to countries. These statistics show a correlation with socio-economic indicators. A comparison will be made with traditional bibliometric indicators. We will argue that astronomy is representative of more general trends.

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E. Henneken and M. Kurtz
Thu, 8 Jun 17
7/69

Comments: 25 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research, Springer

Galaxy Makers: creating an online component to a science exhibition for re-engagement, evaluation and content legacy [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.04563


For the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2016, the Institute of Computational Cosmology from Durham University created the Galaxy Makers exhibit to communicate our computational cosmology and astronomy research. In addition to the physical exhibit we created an online component to foster re-engagement, create a permanent home for our content and to allow us to collect the ever-more important information about participation and impact. Here we summarise the details of the exhibit and the successes of creating an online component. We also share suggestions of further uses and improvements that could be implemented for online components of other science exhibitions.

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J. Borrow and C. Harrison
Mon, 15 May 17
6/42

Comments: Accepted for publication in CAPj

The Role of Gender in Asking Questions at Cool Stars 18 and 19 [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05260


We examine the gender balance of the 18th and 19th meetings of the Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stellar Systems and the Sun (CS18 and CS19). The percent of female attendees at both meetings (31% at CS18 and 37% at CS19) was higher than the percent of women in the American Astronomical Society (25%) and the International Astronomical Union (18%). The representation of women in Cool Stars as SOC members, invited speakers, and contributed speakers was similar to or exceeded the percent of women attending the meetings. We requested that conference attendees assist in a project to collect data on the gender of astronomers asking questions after talks. Using this data, we found that men were over-represented (and women were under-represented) in the question sessions after each talk. Men asked 79% of the questions at CS18 and 75% of the questions at CS19, but were 69% and 63% of the attendees respectively. Contrary to findings from previous conferences, we did not find that the gender balance of questions was strongly affected by the session chair gender, the speaker gender, or the length of the question period. We also found that female and male speakers were asked a comparable number of questions after each talk. The contrast of these results from previous incarnations of the gender questions survey indicate that more data would be useful in understanding the factors that contribute to the gender balance of question askers. We include a preliminary set of recommendations based on this and other work on related topics, but also advocate for additional research on the demographics of conference participants. Additional data on the intersection of gender with race, seniority, sexual orientation, ability and other marginalized identities is necessary to fully address the role of gender in asking questions at conferences.

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S. Schmidt, S. Douglas, N. Gosnell, et. al.
Wed, 19 Apr 17
38/62

Comments: 16 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to Cool Stars 19 Proceedings. Related resources available at this https URL

An educational distributed Cosmic Ray detector network based on ArduSiPM [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.09843


The advent of microcontrollers with enough CPU power and with analog and digital peripherals makes possible to design a complete particle detector with relative acquisition system around one microcontroller chip. The existence of a world wide data infrastructure as internet allows for devising a distributed network of cheap detectors capable to elaborate and send data or respond to settings commands. The internet infrastructure enables to distribute the absolute time (with precision of few milliseconds), to the simple devices far apart, with few milliseconds precision, from a few meters to thousands of kilometres. So it is possible to create a crowdsourcing experiment of citizen science that use small scintillation-based particle detectors to monitor the high energetic cosmic ray and the radiation environment.

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V. Bocci, G. Chiodi, P. Fresch, et. al.
Thu, 30 Mar 17
31/69

Comments: N/A

Widening Perspectives: The Intellectual and Social Benefits of Astrobiology (Regardless of Whether Extraterrestrial Life is Discovered or Not) [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06239


Astrobiology is usually defined as the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. As such it is inherently interdisciplinary and cannot help but engender a worldview infused by cosmic and evolutionary perspectives. Both these attributes of the study of astrobiology are, and will increasingly prove to be, beneficial to society regardless of whether extraterrestrial life is discovered or not.

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I. Crawford
Tue, 21 Mar 2017
3/80

Comments: Accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology

Black Holes and Vacuum Cleaners: Using Metaphor, Relevance, and Inquiry in Labels for Space Images [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.02927


This study extended research on the development of explanatory labels for astronomical images for the non-expert lay public. The research questions addressed how labels with leading questions/metaphors and relevance to everyday life affect comprehension of the intended message for deep space images, the desire to learn more, and the aesthetic appreciation of images. Participants were a convenience sample of 1,921 respondents solicited from a variety of websites and through social media who completed an online survey that used four high-resolution images as stimuli: Sagittarius A*, Solar Flare, Cassiopeia A, and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). Participants were randomly assigned initially to 1 of 3 label conditions: the standard label originally written for the image, a label with a leading question containing a metaphor related to the information for the image, or a label that contained a fact about the image relevant to everyday life. Participants were randomly assigned to 1 image and compared all labels for that image. Open-ended items at various points asked participants to pose questions to a hypothetical astronomer. Main findings were that the relevance condition was significantly more likely to increase wanting to learn more; the original label was most likely to increase overall appreciation; and, smart phone users were more likely to want to learn more and report increased levels of appreciation. Results are discussed in terms of the need to examine individual viewer characteristics and goals in creating different labels for different audiences.

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L. Smith, K. Arcand, B. Smith, et. al.
Thu, 9 Mar 17
32/54

Comments: 50 pages, 7 tables, 2 figures, accepted by the journal “Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts”

Reaching New Heights in Astronomy – ESO Long Term Perspectives [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01249


A comprehensive description of ESO in the current global astronomical context, and its plans for the next decade and beyond, are presented. This survey covers all aspects of the Organisation, including the optical-infrared programme at the La Silla Paranal Observatory, the submillimetre facilities ALMA and APEX, the construction of the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope and the science operation of these facilities. An extension of the current optical/infrared/submillimetre facilities into multi-messenger astronomy has been made with the decision to host the southern Cherenkov Telescope Array at Paranal. The structure of the Organisation is presented and the further development of the staff is described within the scope of the long-range financial planning. The role of Chile is highlighted and expansion of the number of Member States beyond the current 15 is discussed. The strengths of the ESO model, together with challenges as well as possible new opportunities and initiatives, are examined and a strategy for the future of ESO is outlined.

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T. Zeeuw
Fri, 6 Jan 17
39/46

Comments: 26 pages, 17 figures. Appears in The Messenger, December 2016

Quantitative Evaluation of Gender Bias in Astronomical Publications from Citation Counts [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08984


We analyze the role of first (leading) author gender on the number of citations that a paper receives, on the publishing frequency and on the self-citing tendency. We consider a complete sample of over 200,000 publications from 1950 to 2015 from five major astronomy journals. We determine the gender of the first author for over 70% of all publications. The fraction of papers which have a female first author has increased from less than 5% in the 1960s to about 25% today. We find that the increase of the fraction of papers authored by females is slowest in the most prestigious journals such as Science and Nature. Furthermore, female authors write 19$\pm$7% fewer papers in seven years following their first paper than their male colleagues. At all times papers with male first authors receive more citations than papers with female first authors. This difference has been decreasing with time and amounts to $\sim$6% measured over the last 30 years. To account for the fact that the properties of female and male first author papers differ intrinsically, we use a random forest algorithm to control for the non-gender specific properties of these papers which include seniority of the first author, number of references, total number of authors, year of publication, publication journal, field of study and region of the first author’s institution. We show that papers authored by females receive 10.4$\pm$0.9% fewer citations than what would be expected if the papers with the same non-gender specific properties were written by the male authors. Finally, we also find that female authors in our sample tend to self-cite more, but that this effect disappears when controlled for non-gender specific variables.

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N. Caplar, S. Tacchella and S. Birrer
Mon, 31 Oct 16
10/49

Comments: Abridged version to be submitted to Nature Astronomy. Comments welcome. For readers with very little time, the central result of the paper is covered by Figure 6 (Section 5)

The contrivance of Neptune [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.06424


Celebrating 170th anniversary of the discovery of Neptune, I review the story of the discovery that startled the world. The story is an interplay of scientific triumph and human weakness and an example of how science works in a socio-political context.

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D. Krajnovic
Fri, 21 Oct 16
35/47

Comments: A somewhat expanded version of the article published in A&G (October 2016). It differs in two additional text boxes pertaining to the Titius-Bode rule and the naming of the planet, and a correction to the table with pre-discovery sightings of Neptune. 17 pages, two figures and six explanatory boxes. Numeration of figures, tables and boxes is different from the published version

The Astropy Problem [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03159


The Astropy Project (this http URL) is, in its own words, “a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages.” For five years this project has been managed, written, and operated as a grassroots, self-organized, almost entirely volunteer effort while the software is used by the majority of the astronomical community. Despite this, the project has always been and remains to this day effectively unfunded. Further, contributors receive little or no formal recognition for creating and supporting what is now critical software. This paper explores the problem in detail, outlines possible solutions to correct this, and presents a few suggestions on how to address the sustainability of general purpose astronomical software.

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D. Muna, M. Alexander, A. Allen, et. al.
Wed, 12 Oct 16
64/64

Comments: N/A