Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Tuesday 19 July 2016

I think I've just given someone a rather bad day

We report the discovery of a long narrow tidal filament associated with the galaxy in deep co-added Schmidt plate images and deep CCD frames...

I'm afraid not.

Dear Dr. Kemp,

I haven't had time to read your entire paper yet, however I feel it's important to point out that this feature was already reported in Taylor et al. 2013 using INT and SDSS data (Appendix A, figure 2).
We did not analyse the tail in any great detail however. If I recall correctly it was also reported at about the same time by the NGVS team, I will try to find the reference.

It could be worse - I haven't fully read the paper yet but it's clearly way more detailed than mine regarding this particular galaxy. But a discovery it ain't.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.04670
at
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4 comments:

  1. Winchell Chung19 July 2016 at 14:16

    Rhys Taylor you may have given them a bad day, but science is supposed to be self-correcting. You are doing your job.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rhys Taylor19 July 2016 at 14:51

    There's no way they could have found this in the literature. It's reported in my thesis (2010), but that's not on ADS. The 2013 paper has nothing in the abstract about it and oddly it doesn't appear in a NED reference search (the object has 356 references anyway). The only way you could find it would be to Google "VCC 2000 tail". Add "stellar" and it appears in an image search a little way down.

    The internet still has a long way to go before it either contains the sum or human knowledge or that knowledge is readily discoverable.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rhys Taylor19 July 2016 at 15:09

    Also :
    There are no H I observations which could demonstrate whether the filament observed near NGC 4660 is gas rich.
    Actually, yes there are ! And it definitely isn't. Might have to send an additional comment.
    I can't for the life of me find the NGVS paper, except for an internal report which doesn't really count.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Winchell Chung19 July 2016 at 15:12

    Rhys Taylor 
    The internet still has a long way to go before it either contains the sum or human knowledge or that knowledge is readily discoverable.
    Agreed. This situation was foretold in a 1961 science fiction short story called MS Fnd in a Lbry
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry

    ReplyDelete

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