Author Topic: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2  (Read 423177 times)

Offline Dizzy_RHESSI

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1240 on: 11/10/2022 10:23 am »
 
This is an reasonable point.  However, some fraction of this time will not be astronomers themselves developing new calibration techniques, but simply waiting for the pipeline folks (who do not nearly get enough credit, in my opinion) to adjust their techniques and methods to the new machine.   In the meantime, in my experience, the astronomers are developing what results they can from the less-accurately calibrated data.  Others could do this as well.
Either way it takes time, if you have to wait for new calibrations then of course it's quite different to current HST or Chandra. Waiting for the people at STScI to fix all of those issues is going to take a lot longer than 6 months, or a year.

TRAPPIST-1 is actually an argument AGAINST proprietary periods.  The raw data was publicly released right away, yet no one got scooped, no rushed and shoddy papers came out (to my knowledge), and people will still be excited to see the correctly processed and calibrated results when they come out.   I think this will be the rule and not the exception, as scientists are quite capable of recognizing and being appropriately skeptical of preliminary work that took shortcuts.  (The "highest Z" race was an exception, I think, as the target was the media and not the scientific community, so primacy was more important than accuracy.  JWST will soon be past this point, if it's not already.)

The programs are less than half completed. I think it's quite premature to draw any conclusions with zero papers from the team themselves or otherwise. Being scooped isn't something that happens immediately or never, anyone competing with the team also benefits from waiting for the full dataset. It's also quite a stretch to extrapolate the whole field from just two unfinished programs.

I don't agree with this.  The public benefits from this even if no member of the public ever looks at it.  It boosts confidence, not because a random member of the public has any ability to analyze it, but because it shows that other experts have had a chance to analyze it and declined.  As an extreme example, suppose you are giving a public talk on TRAPPIST-1 and some guy (it's almost always a guy) asserts the spectral data demonstrates the existence of aliens.  If you simply and correctly state "Our analysis shows no evidence of aliens", there will still be doubts, in him and others. (Are you doing the right analysis?  Are you hiding something because it's non-orthodox?  Etc.)  But if you can add that "the data is publicly available" then the questioner knows that the minority of experts who are pro-alien (Avi Loeb, etc.) have had a chance to look at it.  They would not be shy pointing out the obvious if it existed in the data.
But in your example that has occurred after the results have been published. My statement was that it doesn't benefit the public now, as only raw data. No one is arguing that the data should never be public.
« Last Edit: 11/10/2022 03:39 pm by Dizzy_RHESSI »

Offline cAsE-sEnSlTivE

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1241 on: 11/10/2022 12:04 pm »
Some data JWST collected on the Trappist system is public and noone wrote a paper about it?

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1242 on: 11/10/2022 06:11 pm »
Some data JWST collected on the Trappist system is public and noone wrote a paper about it?
Yeah that was news to me. I was keen to hear about that.

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1243 on: 11/10/2022 06:13 pm »
The Marvels and Mysteries Revealed by the JWST:


Offline Svetoslav

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1244 on: 11/10/2022 06:15 pm »
I believe that TRAPPIST or potentially habitable exoplanet papers will come very slow and will be checked quite a lot, before coming to conclusions.

History of science is full of examples where stories were corrected, revised or retraced - the ALH84001 meteorite, the arsenic life and recently the phosphine story on Venus.

I'd prefer to wait before jumping on conclusions.

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1245 on: 11/11/2022 08:24 am »
I believe that TRAPPIST or potentially habitable exoplanet papers will come very slow and will be checked quite a lot, before coming to conclusions.

History of science is full of examples where stories were corrected, revised or retraced - the ALH84001 meteorite, the arsenic life and recently the phosphine story on Venus.

I'd prefer to wait before jumping on conclusions.
I wasn’t expecting to see anything about the system paper wise until at least mid-2023 for the reasons you outlined above.

Online LouScheffer

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1246 on: 11/12/2022 12:53 am »
I believe that TRAPPIST or potentially habitable exoplanet papers will come very slow and will be checked quite a lot, before coming to conclusions.

History of science is full of examples where stories were corrected, revised or retraced - the ALH84001 meteorite, the arsenic life and recently the phosphine story on Venus.

I'd prefer to wait before jumping on conclusions.
These are super complicated observations.  First, the basic idea is comparing spectra in and out of transit, and since planets are tiny we are already talking about miniscule differences in spectra, demanding extreme stability and calibration.  Then there are seven planets, several gasses they are trying to detect CO2, H2O, O2, etc., each with different spectrums, and even with JWST the signal-to-noise is low enough that multiple transits will need to be summed to get a significant conclusion. Here is a 28 page paper that is trying to figure out the optimal observing modes/filters to get the data in as few transits as possible.  This is going to take a while to do right.

Offline Oersted

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1247 on: 11/13/2022 06:47 pm »
NASA Telescope, Moon Rocket Named TIME Inventions of 2022

and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket were named 2022 TIME Inventions of the Year.

Invention of the year, powered by RS-25D engines and Shuttle-derived side boosters :-D

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1248 on: 11/24/2022 03:40 pm »
Cool Worlds - JWST Reveals Exoplanets As Never Seen Before:


Offline CMac

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1249 on: 12/02/2022 11:11 am »
In the recently composite photo of pillars of creation, I notice a bright area with a different diffraction pattern, not hexagonal spikes but hexagonal shape. See attached. Why would there be a different pattern?

Edit to add: is it just due to wavelength differences?
 
« Last Edit: 12/02/2022 11:14 am by CMac »

Offline Hobbes-22

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1250 on: 12/02/2022 03:40 pm »
MIRI has additional diffraction patterns. The bright object at the bottom right was taken by MIRI. IDK what's happening with the other object.

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1251 on: 12/05/2022 04:47 pm »
New opinion piece from Scientific American on the propriety data period debate. I still think the eighteenth month period on the upper limit is too long.

Quote
NASA, as a federal agency that funds and conducts research, is onboard with the idea of freely accessible data. But it has a plan that goes much further than the White House’s and that is highly problematic. The agency currently gives a proprietary period to some scientists who use particular facilities, such as a 12-month period for the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), so that those scientists can gather and analyze data carefully without fear of their work being poached. NASA is looking to end this policy in its effort to make science more open-access.

Losing this exclusivity would be really bad for astronomy and planetary science. Without a proprietary period, an astronomer with a brilliant insight might spend years developing it, months crafting a successful proposal to execute it, and precious hours of highly competitive JWST time to actually perform the observations—only to have someone else scoop up the data from a public archive and publish the result. This is a reasonable concern—such scooping has happened before.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-plan-to-make-jwst-data-immediately-available-will-hurt-astronomy/

Offline matthewkantar

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1252 on: 12/05/2022 10:23 pm »
Would be more believable with examples of “scooping.”

Offline Barley

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1253 on: 12/06/2022 03:56 pm »
Astronomers and planetary scientists could decide to give more credit for having brilliant insight, and developing it, and less credit for negotiating bureaucracy.

Offline deadman1204

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1254 on: 12/06/2022 09:46 pm »
Would be more believable with examples of “scooping.”
Are you trolling? How can someone have "scooped" a jwst find when the data has a proprietary period. Thats literally how "scooping" is prevented.

Online LouScheffer

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1255 on: 12/06/2022 10:06 pm »
Would be more believable with examples of “scooping.”
I'd like to see this as well.  All the examples I know of have a senior scientist, already well known and established, working to publish a large paper covering all aspects of a data set.  A more junior researcher finds an interesting sub-piece of this data and published just that part.  The big guy complains (after all they are not shy about seeking credit - that's how they became big) but ultimately little harm is done.  And in some sense the big guy is to blame - they had already privately known about the result, they just had not published it yet.

Whenever I tell this story, folks assure me there are much less gray examples where careers were seriously affected, poor grad student work was ripped off, etc.  But strangely, no one can point me to *an actual example* of this occurring.

Offline matthewkantar

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1256 on: 12/07/2022 03:03 am »
Would be more believable with examples of “scooping.”
Are you trolling? How can someone have "scooped" a jwst find when the data has a proprietary period. Thats literally how "scooping" is prevented.

I never said anybody scooped a JWST finding.

The quoted article says: “Such scooping has happened before.” If the author makes a claim, they should back it up.

Offline Dizzy_RHESSI

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1257 on: 12/07/2022 10:57 am »
Would be more believable with examples of “scooping.”

It would be totally inappropriate to name and shame people in an article like that. Particularly given that there are no rules on what is and is not appropriate, it is a matter of perspective. There are always two sides of a story, but it doesn't change the fact investigators have invested their time in planning and proposing a program and deserve compensation for that. If you want some real examples there was the discovery of water in the atmosphere of K2-18b, where the team who originally got the data found out that a UCL team were publishing their data in Nature Astronomy. The first team then dumped their preliminary work to the arXiv. There was the contentious discoveries of Haumea and Gliese 667Cc. There was a paper on the controversial 3.5 keV x-ray line, which was published a day or so after one of the targets became public. In my field there was the case of the Sunburst Arc, an extraordinary lensed galaxy leaking ionising photons. The discovery team were forced to publish early because another researcher had published an incredibly rushed paper just 2 days after their data became public. That incident is a great example of how these races degrade the quality of science, a half-assed analysis was published without peer review and the original authors immediately published their draft in response instead of waiting for review. The lead author who got scooped was a PhD student, the other paper was lead by someone with a permanent position and it's not the first time they did this either. Scooping is not always malicious or intentional, it doesn't even have to be with the same data. But I'm pretty sure most people in the field can give you a personal example. It's rather rare though that these private anecdotes become public.
« Last Edit: 12/07/2022 12:21 pm by Dizzy_RHESSI »

Online LouScheffer

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1258 on: 12/07/2022 11:51 pm »
Would be more believable with examples of “scooping.”
If you want some real examples there was the discovery of water in the atmosphere of K2-18b, where the team who originally got the data found out that a UCL team were publishing their data in Nature Astronomy. The first team then dumped their preliminary work to the arXiv.
I think science was actually advanced in this case.   Tell me honestly, what do you remember from the final paper that was not in the quick version?  I think I can speak for most scientists and say "Hey, they found water in the atmosphere of a nearby planet!".  And this knowledge was obtained months before the paper would have come out on its own, had the original group had their way.
Quote
In my field there was the case of the Sunburst Arc, an extraordinary lensed galaxy leaking ionising photons. The discovery team were forced to publish early because another researcher had published an incredibly rushed paper just 2 days after their data became public. [...] The lead author who got scooped was a PhD student.
If the lead author in 2018 was T. Emil Rivera-Thorsen, they were not a PhD student, but a post-doc.

If I've got the right articles for these examples, this shows exactly what happens when you ask for examples.   Nobody really got "scooped", instead they had to publish earlier than they would have preferred.  It's not really a hapless grad student that got their thesis crushed, but a early stage researcher that was pushed to publish early.  There are no examples I know of in astronomy where the rushed analysis was wrong and needed to be retracted. (This did happen with COVID pre-prints, though the incentive there was to increase the pace of science more than to beat competitors.)
Quote
That incident is a great example of how these races degrade the quality of science, a half-assed analysis was published without peer review and the original authors immediately published their draft in response instead of waiting for review.
It's not at all obvious that peer review contributes more to science than it hurts by delaying distribution of knowledge.  Here's a major journal that is giving up on it entirely, replacing it with public comment on a initially published article.

I continue to wait for a real example of scooping, as opposed to "almost scooped" or "it could have been really bad".

Offline Dizzy_RHESSI

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Re: NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Discussion Thread 2
« Reply #1259 on: 12/08/2022 11:26 am »

I think science was actually advanced in this case.   Tell me honestly, what do you remember from the final paper that was not in the quick version?  I think I can speak for most scientists and say "Hey, they found water in the atmosphere of a nearby planet!".  And this knowledge was obtained months before the paper would have come out on its own, had the original group had their way.

We're talking about the impact on scientists, not just "science". It makes little difference in the grand scheme whether a paper comes out this month or in 3 months. It does however make a big difference to someone's career if they get a paper in a big journal with global media attention. The original team missed out on that. Note that without the original team this result would have been delayed much further, because they are the ones who got the data taken in the first place.

If the lead author in 2018 was T. Emil Rivera-Thorsen, they were not a PhD student, but a post-doc.

If I've got the right articles for these examples, this shows exactly what happens when you ask for examples.   Nobody really got "scooped", instead they had to publish earlier than they would have preferred.  It's not really a hapless grad student that got their thesis crushed, but a early stage researcher that was pushed to publish early.  There are no examples I know of in astronomy where the rushed analysis was wrong and needed to be retracted. (This did happen with COVID pre-prints, though the incentive there was to increase the pace of science more than to beat competitors.)

My mistake, the site I checked must have been outdated. Regardless it's an early career researcher being scooped by someone with a permanent position.

All these people were scooped, someone published their project before them. That's what scooped means, this is a no-true scotsman fallacy. Note that these are the examples where people were in a position to respond, because they had a publishable draft at the time they were scooped. If the manuscript was less developed then there would be no response and we simply wouldn't have heard about it. It is a survivorship bias. You seem to have ignored my other two examples. Someone doesn't write a paper in 2 days for fun, they're doing it to be first at all costs. And when things are rushed mistakes happen. If you want examples of rushed analyses which turned out false then we have BICEP2 and some of the high redshift pre-flight calibration JWST papers. Retractions are very rare in this field, but that doesn't mean there aren't false results.

It's not at all obvious that peer review contributes more to science than it hurts by delaying distribution of knowledge.  Here's a major journal that is giving up on it entirely, replacing it with public comment on a initially published article.

Peer review absolutely contributes to science by screening obvious errors. You're putting so much emphasis on speed of publication but none on quality control, which is absolutely the wrong view in my opinion. Things should be done properly the first time. The field is degraded by spurious and false results. It takes much longer for the truth to come out if junk results are published and then slowly people have to write responses and try to reproduce the work. Sometimes that takes weeks, other times years. A referee is in a unique position to hold the authors to account, someone writing a response paper cannot force them to do that. Note that the journal is not dropping peer review "entirely", it isn't dropping it at all. It says that it won't reject papers on the basis of reviews but instead will publish all papers and the reviews, it's just a different kind of peer review.

Would science benefit if at the same time there were 10 papers published about K2-18b, half of them claiming a detection and half claiming otherwise? No. Unless you happen to work directly in the field you have no way of knowing which claims are robust. You will have to wait for the dust to settle before concluding anything. If you want to see what science looks like without peer review take a look on viXra. Peer review isn't perfect but it's the only filter against absolute nonsense. Without that the public and people in other fields would have no idea what to believe. It would be left to the media to sort the wheat from the chaff but, as we have seen in the recent nonsense articles surrounding JWST and during the pandemic, they are wholly unqualified for that.
« Last Edit: 12/08/2022 11:28 am by Dizzy_RHESSI »

 

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