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Mars may once have had a much larger moon
Mars may once have had a much larger moon
NASA Announces Plan to Map Milky Way With Roman Space Telescope
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has released detailed plans for a major survey that will reveal our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in unprecedented detail. In one month of observations spread across two years, the survey will unveil tens of billions of stars and explore previously uncharted structures.
This video begins with a view of the Carina Nebula — a giant, relatively nearby star-forming region in the southern sky. Roman will view the entire nebula as well as its surroundings, including a 10,000 light-year-long swath of the spiral arm it resides in. The observation will offer an unparalleled opportunity to watch how stars grow, interact, and sculpt their environments, and it’s just one of many thousands of highlights astronomers are looking forward to from the Galactic Plane Survey NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will conduct.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
“The Galactic Plane Survey will revolutionize our understanding of the Milky Way,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We’ll be able to explore the mysterious far side of our galaxy and its star-studded heart. Because of the survey’s breadth and depth, it will be a scientific mother lode.”
The Galactic Plane Survey is Roman’s first selected general astrophysics survey — one of many observation programs Roman will do in addition to its three core surveys and Coronagraph technology demonstration. At least 25% of Roman’s five-year primary mission is reserved for astronomers worldwide to propose more surveys beyond the core programs, fully leveraging Roman’s capabilities to conduct groundbreaking science. Roman is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026.
While ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) retired Gaia spacecraft mapped around 2 billion Milky Way stars in visible light, many parts of the galaxy remain hidden by dust. By surveying in infrared light, Roman will use powerful heat vision that can pierce this veil to see what lies beyond.
“It blows my mind that we will be able to see through the densest part of our galaxy and explore it properly for the first time,” said Rachel Street, a senior scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory in Santa Barbara, California, and a co-chair of the committee that selected the Galactic Plane Survey design.
This infographic describes the 29-day Galactic Plane Survey that will be conducted by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The survey’s main component will cover 691 square degrees — a region of sky as large as around 3,500 full moons — in 22.5 days. Roman will also view a smaller area — 19 square degrees, the area of 95 full moons — repeatedly for about 5.5 days total to capture things that change over time. The survey’s final component will image a smattering of even smaller areas, adding up to about 4 square degrees (the area of 20 full moons) and 31 total hours, with Roman’s full suite of filters and spectroscopic tools. The survey will reveal our home galaxy in unprecedented detail including many in regions we’ve never been able to see before because they’re blocked by dust, unveiling tens of billions of stars and other objects.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
The survey will cover nearly 700 square degrees (a region of sky as large as about 3,500 full moons) along the glowing band of the Milky Way — our edge-on view of the disk-shaped structure containing most of our galaxy’s stars, gas, and dust. Scientists expect the survey to map up to 20 billion stars and detect tiny shifts in their positions with repeated high-resolution observations. And it will only take 29 days spread over the course of the mission’s first two years.
Cosmic CradlesStars are born from parent clouds of gas and dust. Roman will peer through the haze of these nesting grounds to see millions of stellar embryos, newborn stars still swaddled in shrouds of dust, tantrumming toddler stars that flare unpredictably, and young stars that may have planetary systems forming around them. Astronomers will study stellar birth rates across a wide range of masses and stitch together videos that show how stars change over time.
“This survey will study such a huge number of stars in so many different stellar environments that we’ll be sampling every phase of a star’s evolution,” Street said.
Observing so many stars in various stages of early development will shed light on the forces that shape them. Star formation is like a four way tug-of-war between gravity, radiation, magnetism, and turbulence. Roman will help us study how these forces influence whether gas clouds collapse into full-fledged stars, smaller brown dwarfs — in-between objects that are much heavier than planets but not massive enough to ignite like stars — or new worlds.
The Galactic Plane Survey by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will scan the densest part of our galaxy, where most of its stars, gas, and dust reside — the most difficult region to study from our place inside the Milky Way since we have to look through so much light-blocking material. Roman’s wide field of view, crisp resolution, and infrared vision will help astronomers peer through thick bands of dust to chart new galactic territory.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Some stars are born in enormous litters called clusters. Roman will study nearly 2,000 young, loosely bound open clusters to see how the galaxy’s spiral arms trigger star formation. The survey will also map dozens of ancient, densely packed globular clusters near the center of the galaxy that could help astronomers reconstruct the Milky Way’s early history.
Comparing Roman’s snapshots of clusters scattered throughout the galaxy will enable scientists to study nature versus nurture on a cosmic scale. Because a cluster’s stars generally share the same age, origin, and chemical makeup, analyzing them allows astronomers to isolate environmental effects very precisely.
Pulse CheckWhen they run out of fuel, Sun-like stars leave behind cores called white dwarfs and heavier stars collapse to form neutron stars and black holes. Roman will find these stellar embers even when they’re alone thanks to wrinkles in space-time.
Anything that has mass warps the underlying fabric of the universe. When light from a background star passes through the gravitational well around an intervening object on its journey toward Earth, its path slightly curves around the object. This phenomenon, called microlensing, can temporarily brighten the star. By studying these signals, astronomers can learn the mass and size of otherwise invisible foreground objects.
A separate survey — Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey — will conduct deep microlensing observations over a smaller area in the heart of the Milky Way. The Galactic Plane Survey will conduct repeated observations over a shorter interval but across the whole center of the galaxy, giving us the first complete view of this complex galactic environment. An unobscured view of the galaxy’s central bar will help astronomers answer the question of its origin, and Roman’s videos of stars in this region will enable us to study some ultratight binary objects at the very ends of their lives thanks to their interactions with close companions.
“Compact binaries are particularly interesting because they’re precursors to gravitational-wave sources,” said Robert Benjamin, a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and a co-chair of the committee that selected the Galactic Plane Survey design. When neutron stars and black holes merge, the collision is so powerful that it sends ripples through the fabric of space-time. “Scientists want to know more about the pathways that lead to those mergers.”
optical infrared This colorful image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and published in 2018, celebrated the observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens. opticalinfrared This colorful image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and published in 2018, celebrated the observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens. optical infraredOptical vs infrared
Two Views CurtainToggle2-Up Image Details The Galactic Plane Survey by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will scan the densest part of our galaxy, where most of its stars, gas, and dust reside — the most difficult region to study from our place inside the Milky Way since we have to look through so much light-blocking material. Roman’s wide field of view, crisp resolution, and infrared vision will help astronomers peer through thick bands of dust to chart new galactic territory. Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScIRoman’s repeated observations will also monitor stars that flicker. Ground-based surveys detect thousands of bright stellar outbursts, but often can’t see the faint, dust-obscured stars that produce them. Roman will pinpoint the culprits plus take high-resolution snapshots of the aftermath.
Some stars throb rhythmically, and the speed of their pulsing is directly linked to their intrinsic brightness. By comparing their true brightness to how bright they appear from Earth, astronomers can measure distances across the galaxy. Roman will find these blinking stars farther away than ever before and track them over time, helping astronomers improve their cosmic measuring sticks.
“Pairing Roman’s Galactic Plane Survey with other Milky Way observations will create the best portrait of the galaxy we’ve ever had,” Benjamin said.
Download additional images and video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
For more information about the Roman Space Telescope, visit:
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940
NASA Announces Plan to Map Milky Way With Roman Space Telescope
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has released detailed plans for a major survey that will reveal our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in unprecedented detail. In one month of observations spread across two years, the survey will unveil tens of billions of stars and explore previously uncharted structures.
This video begins with a view of the Carina Nebula — a giant, relatively nearby star-forming region in the southern sky. Roman will view the entire nebula as well as its surroundings, including a 10,000 light-year-long swath of the spiral arm it resides in. The observation will offer an unparalleled opportunity to watch how stars grow, interact, and sculpt their environments, and it’s just one of many thousands of highlights astronomers are looking forward to from the Galactic Plane Survey NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will conduct.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
“The Galactic Plane Survey will revolutionize our understanding of the Milky Way,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We’ll be able to explore the mysterious far side of our galaxy and its star-studded heart. Because of the survey’s breadth and depth, it will be a scientific mother lode.”
The Galactic Plane Survey is Roman’s first selected general astrophysics survey — one of many observation programs Roman will do in addition to its three core surveys and Coronagraph technology demonstration. At least 25% of Roman’s five-year primary mission is reserved for astronomers worldwide to propose more surveys beyond the core programs, fully leveraging Roman’s capabilities to conduct groundbreaking science. Roman is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026.
While ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) retired Gaia spacecraft mapped around 2 billion Milky Way stars in visible light, many parts of the galaxy remain hidden by dust. By surveying in infrared light, Roman will use powerful heat vision that can pierce this veil to see what lies beyond.
“It blows my mind that we will be able to see through the densest part of our galaxy and explore it properly for the first time,” said Rachel Street, a senior scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory in Santa Barbara, California, and a co-chair of the committee that selected the Galactic Plane Survey design.
This infographic describes the 29-day Galactic Plane Survey that will be conducted by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The survey’s main component will cover 691 square degrees — a region of sky as large as around 3,500 full moons — in 22.5 days. Roman will also view a smaller area — 19 square degrees, the area of 95 full moons — repeatedly for about 5.5 days total to capture things that change over time. The survey’s final component will image a smattering of even smaller areas, adding up to about 4 square degrees (the area of 20 full moons) and 31 total hours, with Roman’s full suite of filters and spectroscopic tools. The survey will reveal our home galaxy in unprecedented detail including many in regions we’ve never been able to see before because they’re blocked by dust, unveiling tens of billions of stars and other objects.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight CenterThe survey will cover nearly 700 square degrees (a region of sky as large as about 3,500 full moons) along the glowing band of the Milky Way — our edge-on view of the disk-shaped structure containing most of our galaxy’s stars, gas, and dust. Scientists expect the survey to map up to 20 billion stars and detect tiny shifts in their positions with repeated high-resolution observations. And it will only take 29 days spread over the course of the mission’s first two years.
Cosmic CradlesStars are born from parent clouds of gas and dust. Roman will peer through the haze of these nesting grounds to see millions of stellar embryos, newborn stars still swaddled in shrouds of dust, tantrumming toddler stars that flare unpredictably, and young stars that may have planetary systems forming around them. Astronomers will study stellar birth rates across a wide range of masses and stitch together videos that show how stars change over time.
“This survey will study such a huge number of stars in so many different stellar environments that we’ll be sampling every phase of a star’s evolution,” Street said.
Observing so many stars in various stages of early development will shed light on the forces that shape them. Star formation is like a four way tug-of-war between gravity, radiation, magnetism, and turbulence. Roman will help us study how these forces influence whether gas clouds collapse into full-fledged stars, smaller brown dwarfs — in-between objects that are much heavier than planets but not massive enough to ignite like stars — or new worlds.
The Galactic Plane Survey by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will scan the densest part of our galaxy, where most of its stars, gas, and dust reside — the most difficult region to study from our place inside the Milky Way since we have to look through so much light-blocking material. Roman’s wide field of view, crisp resolution, and infrared vision will help astronomers peer through thick bands of dust to chart new galactic territory.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Some stars are born in enormous litters called clusters. Roman will study nearly 2,000 young, loosely bound open clusters to see how the galaxy’s spiral arms trigger star formation. The survey will also map dozens of ancient, densely packed globular clusters near the center of the galaxy that could help astronomers reconstruct the Milky Way’s early history.
Comparing Roman’s snapshots of clusters scattered throughout the galaxy will enable scientists to study nature versus nurture on a cosmic scale. Because a cluster’s stars generally share the same age, origin, and chemical makeup, analyzing them allows astronomers to isolate environmental effects very precisely.
Pulse CheckWhen they run out of fuel, Sun-like stars leave behind cores called white dwarfs and heavier stars collapse to form neutron stars and black holes. Roman will find these stellar embers even when they’re alone thanks to wrinkles in space-time.
Anything that has mass warps the underlying fabric of the universe. When light from a background star passes through the gravitational well around an intervening object on its journey toward Earth, its path slightly curves around the object. This phenomenon, called microlensing, can temporarily brighten the star. By studying these signals, astronomers can learn the mass and size of otherwise invisible foreground objects.
A separate survey — Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey — will conduct deep microlensing observations over a smaller area in the heart of the Milky Way. The Galactic Plane Survey will conduct repeated observations over a shorter interval but across the whole center of the galaxy, giving us the first complete view of this complex galactic environment. An unobscured view of the galaxy’s central bar will help astronomers answer the question of its origin, and Roman’s videos of stars in this region will enable us to study some ultratight binary objects at the very ends of their lives thanks to their interactions with close companions.
“Compact binaries are particularly interesting because they’re precursors to gravitational-wave sources,” said Robert Benjamin, a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and a co-chair of the committee that selected the Galactic Plane Survey design. When neutron stars and black holes merge, the collision is so powerful that it sends ripples through the fabric of space-time. “Scientists want to know more about the pathways that lead to those mergers.”
optical infrared This colorful image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and published in 2018, celebrated the observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens. opticalinfrared This colorful image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and published in 2018, celebrated the observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens. optical infraredOptical vs infrared
Two Views CurtainToggle2-Up Image Details The Galactic Plane Survey by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will scan the densest part of our galaxy, where most of its stars, gas, and dust reside — the most difficult region to study from our place inside the Milky Way since we have to look through so much light-blocking material. Roman’s wide field of view, crisp resolution, and infrared vision will help astronomers peer through thick bands of dust to chart new galactic territory. Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScIRoman’s repeated observations will also monitor stars that flicker. Ground-based surveys detect thousands of bright stellar outbursts, but often can’t see the faint, dust-obscured stars that produce them. Roman will pinpoint the culprits plus take high-resolution snapshots of the aftermath.
Some stars throb rhythmically, and the speed of their pulsing is directly linked to their intrinsic brightness. By comparing their true brightness to how bright they appear from Earth, astronomers can measure distances across the galaxy. Roman will find these blinking stars farther away than ever before and track them over time, helping astronomers improve their cosmic measuring sticks.
“Pairing Roman’s Galactic Plane Survey with other Milky Way observations will create the best portrait of the galaxy we’ve ever had,” Benjamin said.
Download additional images and video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
For more information about the Roman Space Telescope, visit:
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940
Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks December 13-14
Great news! We'll have dark skies for the year's richest meteor shower.
The post Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks December 13-14 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Week in images: 08-12 December 2025
Week in images: 08-12 December 2025
Discover our week through the lens
XMM-Newton sees comet 3I/ATLAS in X-ray light
Pablo Álvarez Fernández | Spacesuits, Survival & Spacewalk Dreams | ESA Explores #18
Step inside astronaut training with ESA astronaut Pablo Álvarez Fernández as he shares his training journey from Cologne in Germany to Houston in the US. Discover what it’s like to wear a 145 kg spacesuit underwater, train for emergencies like fires and ammonia leaks and prepare for the ultimate astronaut dream: a spacewalk. Plus, Pablo talks about life in Houston, teamwork under pressure and what’s next on his path to the stars.
This interview was recorded in December 2024.
You can listen to this episode on all major podcast platforms.
Keep exploring with ESA Explores!
Is the Big Bang a Myth? Part 1: Creation Stories
Let’s say you are transported back in time to some ancient culture. And along the way you somehow forget everything you knew about modern cosmology (don’t worry about the details, it’s just to get us going here, pretend if you have to that it’s a very strange and selective sort of amnesia introduced by the time traveling device).
Gravitational Lenses Deliver a Verdict on the Hubble Tension
The Hubble Tension is one of the great mysteries of cosmology. Solving it might require a fundamental change in how we understand the universe - but scientists have to prove it actually exists first. A new paper from a collective of cosmologist researchers known as the TDCOSMO Collaboration adds further fuel to that first with updated measurements of the “Late Universe” measurement of the Hubble Constant using gravitational lenses of quasars, which shows that the Tension might exist after all.
Photos Reveal Moths Sipping Tears from a Moose
Moths sometimes drink the tears of other animals, but the behavior has mostly been observed in the tropics. New photographs show only the second observation outside of that area
Massive Stars Make Their Mark in Hubble Image
- Hubble Home
- Overview
- Impact & Benefits
- Science
- Observatory
- Team
- Multimedia
- News
- More
2 min read
Massive Stars Make Their Mark in Hubble Image This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the blue dwarf galaxy Markarian 178 (Mrk 178) against a backdrop of distant galaxies in all shapes and sizes. Some of these distant galaxies even shine through the diffuse edges of Mrk 178. ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Annibali, S. Hong
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a glittering blue dwarf galaxy called Markarian 178 (Mrk 178). The galaxy, which is substantially smaller than our own Milky Way, lies 13 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear).
Mrk 178 is one of more than 1,500 Markarian galaxies. These galaxies get their name from the Armenian astrophysicist Benjamin Markarian, who compiled a list of galaxies that were surprisingly bright in ultraviolet light.
While the bulk of the galaxy is blue due to an abundance of young, hot stars with little dust shrouding them, Mrk 178 gets a red hue from a collection of rare massive Wolf–Rayet stars. These stars are concentrated in the brightest, reddish region near the galaxy’s edge. Wolf–Rayet stars cast off their atmospheres through powerful winds, and the bright emission lines from their hot stellar winds are etched upon the galaxy’s spectrum. Both ionized hydrogen and oxygen lines are particularly strong and appear as a red color in this photo.
Massive stars enter the Wolf–Rayet phase of their evolution just before they collapse into black holes or neutron stars. Because Wolf–Rayet stars last for only a few million years, researchers know that something must have triggered a recent burst of star formation in Mrk 178. At first glance, it’s not clear what could be the cause — Mrk 178 doesn’t seem to have any close galactic neighbors that may have stirred up its gas to form new stars. Instead, researchers suspect that a gas cloud crashed into Mrk 178, or that the intergalactic medium disturbed its gas as the galaxy moved through space. Either disturbance could light up this tiny galaxy with a ripple of bright new stars.
@NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Linkedin logo @NASAHubbleMedia Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble’s Galaxies
Hubble & Citizen Science
Hubble News
Massive Stars Make Their Mark in Hubble Image
- Hubble Home
- Overview
- Impact & Benefits
- Science
- Observatory
- Team
- Multimedia
- News
- More
2 min read
Massive Stars Make Their Mark in Hubble Image This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the blue dwarf galaxy Markarian 178 (Mrk 178) against a backdrop of distant galaxies in all shapes and sizes. Some of these distant galaxies even shine through the diffuse edges of Mrk 178. ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Annibali, S. HongThis NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a glittering blue dwarf galaxy called Markarian 178 (Mrk 178). The galaxy, which is substantially smaller than our own Milky Way, lies 13 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear).
Mrk 178 is one of more than 1,500 Markarian galaxies. These galaxies get their name from the Armenian astrophysicist Benjamin Markarian, who compiled a list of galaxies that were surprisingly bright in ultraviolet light.
While the bulk of the galaxy is blue due to an abundance of young, hot stars with little dust shrouding them, Mrk 178 gets a red hue from a collection of rare massive Wolf–Rayet stars. These stars are concentrated in the brightest, reddish region near the galaxy’s edge. Wolf–Rayet stars cast off their atmospheres through powerful winds, and the bright emission lines from their hot stellar winds are etched upon the galaxy’s spectrum. Both ionized hydrogen and oxygen lines are particularly strong and appear as a red color in this photo.
Massive stars enter the Wolf–Rayet phase of their evolution just before they collapse into black holes or neutron stars. Because Wolf–Rayet stars last for only a few million years, researchers know that something must have triggered a recent burst of star formation in Mrk 178. At first glance, it’s not clear what could be the cause — Mrk 178 doesn’t seem to have any close galactic neighbors that may have stirred up its gas to form new stars. Instead, researchers suspect that a gas cloud crashed into Mrk 178, or that the intergalactic medium disturbed its gas as the galaxy moved through space. Either disturbance could light up this tiny galaxy with a ripple of bright new stars.
@NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Linkedin logo @NASAHubbleMedia Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble’s Galaxies
Hubble & Citizen Science
Hubble News
#774: How Does Bad Science Happen?
Scientific expertise is under attack on all fronts with concerns coming from politicians and the public. While most of this is unwarranted and politically motivated, there can be germ of truth. Bad science does happen, but how? How is it that papers that very few believe still make it through peer review and to publication? Why do professors at prominent universities get quoted saying things that seem to be fiction? In this episode, we consider the case for letting potentially impossible things make it to publication.
Show Notes- What is “bad science”?
- Bias and the scientific method
- P-values and “p-hacking”
- Breakthroughs that challenged consensus
- Academic pressure and “publish or perish”
- Competition and bad behavior in academia
- Institutions, media, and incentives
- Filters for real breakthroughs
- Careers, communication, and risk
[Fraser Cain]
Astronomy Cast, episode 774. How does bad science happen? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos.
We’re helping you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today.
With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute, and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
I am thinking right now that we need to say that this episode is not how we know what we know, but it’s how what we know gets confused by bad publications.
[Fraser Cain]
How we know what we know, how we know what we don’t know, how we don’t know what we don’t know, how we don’t know what we know.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
How noise gets added to the system, basically.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah, mistakes get made.
[Fraser Cain]
Scientific expertise is under attack on all fronts, with concerns coming from politicians and the public. While most of this is unwarranted and politically motivated, there could be a germ of truth. Bad science does happen, but how?
So, do you have an example in your mind of perhaps some bad science that you want to share?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So, lately the two big ones in my life have been all of the attempts by non-planetary scientists to publish about 3i Atlas. And there have been some fascinating cherry picking of supernova data that is attempting to get rid of dark energy until you realize they’re cherry picking the data and what they’re saying doesn’t actually make sense if you look at stellar evolution.
[Fraser Cain]
So, specifically, you’re talking about examples where people who do have scientific training are cherry picking results to tell a certain scientific narrative that is not necessarily shared by the scientific consensus and the scientific mainstream.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yes.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. And, like, this is a spectrum because, you know, there are even, you know, you could almost describe them as scandals that are happening, the reproducibility crisis that’s going on in biology, psychology, this concept of p-hacking that scientists will sometimes do.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
We have to back up on that one because said out loud, that’s deeply confusing. There is a value in statistics, it is the lowercase letter p equals value that is used to define how likely your output fits to a given situation. And it’s called the p-value.
Luckily, I never have to deal with it in my life, but there are statisticians and stats is largely black magic as far as I’m concerned because you’re dealing with what is the noise in your system, what is the noise in the universe, what is the distribution that should occur due to things like chaos theory, what is the distribution that should happen because of motion and thermal statistics, all of these different things layer up to affect what the population should look like for a given system because of just noise.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. Well, we’ll get into this a bit more as we talk about this. So I want to approach this from a couple of perspectives.
The first perspective is how good scientists can delude themselves. And, you know, really focusing on this idea of confirmation bias, that we are looking for evidence that matches our preexisting conclusion. Yeah.
So give me a sense as a scientist, how do you approach a problem or approach a scientific question without biasing yourself on what is the outcome that you’re hoping to accomplish?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
The best examples I’ve seen and what I try to do is you take the data and then you brainstorm every single possible thing that could fit that data and you work through and you’re like, if it is this, we expect to see all of these things. Do we see all of those things? No.
Well, what parts of them do we or don’t we see and what could explain that? All right. So let’s look at the next thing.
What of these things would we expect to see? What do we actually see? What could explain the difference?
A brilliant paper I once saw that also made me die laughing was trying to figure out data that had dimming in an object. And they said, eagle flies in front of telescope as one of the things that they had to figure out what would that do to the light curve.
[Fraser Cain]
What would that look like to the light curve?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And so you have to take into account all the different things that could be at play and what are all the different things that could explain what you see.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And this idea of confirmation bias is pernicious. It is baked in to our brains.
And this is a thing that we are always going to be having to double check and double check. And the best amongst us will fall for this confirmation bias, that there is an outcome that you are expecting, an outcome that you think is most likely, most logical, and that then you are looking for the evidence that matches that outcome and you are ignoring the evidence that is less evidence for that outcome. You talk about this, you brainstorm this gigantic list, but even just how do you resist?
How do you notice when you are potentially going down this confirmation bias pathway?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It’s really hard. And quite often, human beings simply aren’t as creative as the universe is, which is a really weird thing to say. But there’s different things that occur in science where I look at the results and I’m like, how did they ever figure that out?
Who came up with that explanation? It’s brilliant, but how did you get from here to here? And you have to be super creative.
And this is part of where you hear people saying that it’s young scientists who make the amazing breakthroughs because they’re still not as influenced in a way by having to cynically keep saying to people, no, no, that actually doesn’t work. No, no, no, that doesn’t work. And you reach a certain point in your life where your gut response to everything is going to be no.
[Fraser Cain]
Right, that won’t work.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Right. So it’s when you’re young and not as, I don’t know, embittered, something, that you’re willing to go there and take in all the different ideas. And sometimes your data doesn’t give you a choice.
The 1998 supernova results, there was two different research teams that both saw a trend in the typical luminosity of supernova as a function of their velocity. And this indicated that either something is screwy with supernovae as a function of when they went off in the universe or our universe is actually accelerating over time and how it expands. That was undeniable.
And since then, people have been going through trying to find every possible way to explain that supernovae were actually just intrinsically fainter in the past. And nothing works if you look at an unbiased sample of galaxies.
[Fraser Cain]
Right, yeah. So confirmation bias is, I think, the strongest one. Yes.
But there are a bunch of other biases. Recency bias is another one. You can go and look up cognitive biases, and I think there’s like 80?
I forget how many there are. There are a lot, easily in the 30s, of biases that can influence our thinking. And often you have to go through this process and say, okay, I learned about this, I don’t know, kind of car, and now I’m seeing this car everywhere.
Is it a conspiracy? Oh, no, that’s recency bias. Man, confirmation bias is that experience you have when you’re on autopilot and you’re expecting something to go one way and then it doesn’t go that way.
Like you take a jar out of the fridge, you take a drink, you’re expecting it to be cold coffee and it’s apple juice.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
And suddenly, the moment you realize that it’s apple juice is the moment that you’re drinking it, and you’re like, wait a minute.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Okay, of course it’s apple juice. I’ve grabbed the apple juice container. But my brain was so certain that I was going to be grabbing the coffee that I drank the coffee, and then it’s that moment when reality informs you that you’ve made this mistake.
But that’s just, you know, those are a couple of examples. There are so many different biases that we can fall for that are constantly, and really the scientific method has been about let’s learn all of the different ways that the human brain can go wrong and try to account for those. And so what are the kinds of techniques that a scientist will use to try and hit the gold standard of good science?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Literally the best that I see in the literature are just where you’re like, okay, I’ve gone to a bunch of conferences, I’ve presented this research, I’ve listened to the question and answers, I’ve heard everyone saying, well, could it be this? Could it be this?
[Fraser Cain]
Right, yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And here’s me going through and addressing every single one of them. Now, that’s the gold standard. The problem that you run into though is sometimes people, and this can occur at any point in your career, are so shaped by I wrote a proposal for my dissertation to do X, I got a grant funded to do X, and the data is actually consistent with three.
Not X. It’s not even a letter. It’s something over here somewhere.
And it’s really hard to get your brain, especially when you’re only talking to rooms full of people that are in your subdiscipline, it’s really hard to get your brain to open up all the way like that person whose paper said, this is what an eagle would do if it flew in front of our data. It was brilliant. Big bear observatory for the win.
You have to sometimes sit down and talk to people in other fields. You have to hopefully work somewhere that if your results don’t match what you proposed, it gets celebrated. You hopefully are working on a dissertation where you will still get it if you prove something very different from what you set out to prove.
And so being, this is going to sound so dumb, but being in a place where you are safe to talk to people outside of your discipline to get input and you’re allowed to have unexpected results are both necessary.
[Fraser Cain]
So we’ve talked about how the researcher can kind of fool themselves. How does, and you sort of touched on this a little bit, but how does the environment of the scientific community, the expectations and the demands of how science works, how can that potentially cause bad science?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
People end up working on the same idea year after year after year, trying to prove what I’m doing is right. You get into a rut. You get your old grants renewed.
You keep going down the same rabbit hole. And once you start down that path, you have to say I was wrong or this isn’t going where I was hoping it was going, which isn’t the same thing as I was wrong. It’s just the I am bored now.
This is just not what I was hoping for. And human beings really aren’t good at doing either of those things. And so we will see people that start on a project as a graduate student and it’s cool and they get attention and they get their PhD and they get their first job to continue working on that work.
And so they continue building on the same data set, getting a very similar data set. And they don’t make the necessary leap to broaden even their own horizons. And by siloing themselves and following the easy dopamine hit of incremental breakthroughs, they can end up doing things where they are working with deeply biased data sets.
We’re seeing this in cosmology right now. They can end up being influenced by if I come out and say it’s not alien spacecraft, my books are going to stop selling and I’m going to lose a major part of my income.
[Fraser Cain]
Right, right. We’re going to talk about that later on. But I guess for me, my question was more about the environment of the academic system.
So for example, Publish or Perish, right?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
That your worth as a scientist depends on you publishing on a regular basis. Yeah, it’s constant. It’s constant.
And you are either trying to fundraise or you are trying to write up the results of your work. Or both. And null results are not interesting, right?
People want results. And so if you go and do this enormous amount of work and you’re like, yeah, we didn’t find it, right? That is considered a waste of your time.
Even though null results are equally as important as positive results. And so it just shows you where to not look or constrains the boundaries or whatever, right? That it’s a mill, it’s a grind that scientists are in this position.
And instead of being able to take the time to really come up with a result that they’re very proud of, the pressure is hurry up and get out your results. Publish, publish, publish. And we are swimming in papers.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. Half-baked papers.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah, yeah. Millions of papers. I think a million papers a year.
Paul Sutter wrote a book on this. And there’s just so many papers coming out. And he identified a whole bunch of these ideas that the environment is very much working in a direction that makes it very hard to be a really good scientist.
There’s a lot of changes they could make that would allow science to move more smoothly. All right. So the beginning of this episode has all been about how scientists can fool themselves and either end up in a dead end or even publish a result that is incorrect just through confirmation bias, through whatever.
How the system really encourages you to publish quickly, to cut corners, to get by on trying to do more with less. That there’s a lot of institutional and sort of larger architectural issues with the scientific community. But let’s talk about individuals.
What if you know how the scientific system works and you want to do bad science because it makes your life better? Either you have courses you want to sell, you have positions that you want to gain, you have books you want to sell, you have TV appearances you want to do, blogs, you want to gain tenure. There’s stuff that you can do.
How can you sort of work this system?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
One of the easiest ways is to have a friend group of prominent individuals that will both suppress the papers of your competition and support your papers. Befriending, it’s at the end of the day, an old boys network. And I mean that in every adjective I used.
Right, yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
So does this come like there are people who are on the journals who are reviewing these things, people who are doing the peer review?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So you send it to a journal that’s friendly. You suggest people to review your paper that you know will approve it. And you get the word out, hey, I heard this group is about to come out with this paper.
You’re going to want to turn it down. And you say this to all the people who might be reviewing it. And you get the word out.
And you give your list of reasons that it shouldn’t review well. And one of the most eye-opening moments I had in undergraduate was we had a prominent solar scientist at our institute. And he took two or three of the graduate students with him to a conference.
And we were all hanging out talking. And the grad students were like, it was wild this other prominent solar scientist put a slide down on it. This was the days of the overhead projectors.
That was literally a gravestone of prominent person at my institute. And then just spent their talk shredding. Wow.
Yeah, it gets that brutal. It gets that mean. You and I have been at conferences where we’ve seen one person give a presentation.
And then their competitor went around the room saying, no, no, no, no, that’s wrong to all the journalists. Yes. And it’s insane.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah, right. So this sort of like the politics and the sort of because the benefits are like if you are successful, if you discover something important, if you get meaningful papers published in distinguished journals, you get funding, you get tenure, you get all of these benefits. And so the tendency, the natural human tendencies to try to play to the humans factor of what you’re doing is really hard to resist for a lot of people.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And it goes as deep as it’s common for a while. I don’t know if it’s still true, but for a while there was this like chain between Michigan State University and the University of Texas where there is a bunch of people between both institutions. There was between Harvard and Stanford.
There’s just these various institutes where it’s fairly common for someone to do undergrad at one, grad at the other, grad at one, postdoc at the other. And people just flow back and forth. And you end up with entire networks of people that just like, oh, this team does good work.
I approve their paper. And at the same time, you know, this institute and this institute are both going up for funding for the same thing, are both competing for the same thing. Your buddies on this team, your students can get jobs on this team.
You’re going to support this team. And on this team’s paper, like the comment that caused me to throw things was, why did you not explain why we shouldn’t fund your competitor with this grant? Well, my competitor didn’t ask for funding to do this work.
I did. But it’s at that level of comments going back and forth.
[Fraser Cain]
Right, right. And the reality is just that what you have to gain is that you get to do your science. What you have to lose is that you don’t have a job.
Right. And so you’re going to, you know, unfortunately try to adapt what you’re saying, what you’re proposing, what you’re planning so that it will be more acceptable to the people who make those kinds of decisions. And, you know, I mean, I think we’ve got a current climate that’s happening in the U.S. where, you know, up until a certain point, there was real value in proposing topics that deal with people with, you know, diversity, people who come from less advantaged backgrounds. You know, think about things in psychology and economy. And now suddenly, boom, everything’s switched around. And so now, you know, if you were before trying to say why it’s important to educate disadvantaged youths, it just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now that’s a very difficult sell. And the universities are on tenterhooks. And you need to be very, very careful about how you do that.
And that, like, how can that not affect the science?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And people are going to work even harder to protect their friends. And we work with the same people our entire life. There are people in this profession that have known me since I was in eighth grade, and that’s horrifying.
No one in their midlife wants anyone to remember what they were like when they were in middle school. And because it’s such a small community, there are so few jobs, the number of jobs are decreasing. People are just going to want to look much more favorably upon the work of the people, the institute, the research teams that they hope to see survive.
[Fraser Cain]
So one thing that I’ve noticed, and especially as a journalist, you know, people reach out to me directly to promote their work. And I will always respond to them, you know, I’m just a journalist. I’m not a scientist.
I have no way of knowing whether what you are doing is science or not. You know, I am unqualified to judge. So I need some kind of filter, such as archive or a journal article or a press release coming from NASA for me to know whether or not it is the actual breakthrough discovery that you are suggesting.
So we’ve seen, you know, we’ve seen a bunch of examples. There was like a superconductor, a room temperature superconductor. There was cold fusion back in the 80s.
There’s, you know, there’s claims, as you said, about supernova, claims about alien spacecraft moving through the solar system, that there’s a kind of a turn to the public. Going on the, you know, making the rounds on the podcasts. What is the kind of the end goal for that?
Because from my perspective as a journalist, that’s a one-way street that you don’t come back along. You know, if you’re going to go on the podcast and you’re going to say stuff that your scientific colleagues will go, well, that’s just nonsense. Will you ever be able to exist in this, in the realm of academia again?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
The trick that I’ve seen is you get tenure. Once you have tenure, it’s almost impossible to fire you. You can say anything you want.
Yeah. Then you start the press releases that will get you the speaking gigs that pay large amounts of money. Then you get the agent who will sell your books.
Then you go on the podcast circuit to sell your books. Then you launch the substack, the ghost, the beehive, whatever. Don’t use substack.
It has Nazis. All of these things generate revenue and clicks. It turns out that nowadays, universities and institutes want their researchers to accomplish four different things basically.
One, do not get them in trouble. Now, certain institutes, bad press is still good press. Just don’t touch anyone inappropriately.
Then they want you to be a source of revenue.
[Fraser Cain]
Raise money.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
That can take the form of grants or donations. Saying wild stuff can often attract donations.
[Fraser Cain]
From the people who this meets their political objectives.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yes.
[Fraser Cain]
We don’t see it so much in astronomy, but in other fields for sure that there are climate things you can say. There are political things, sociological things, biological things you can say, science you can do that will bring in the donations.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Then in addition to that, they want to raise attention for the institute. This can be name recognition. This can be news articles.
I make so many universities sad because I cite the name of the researchers and the name of the publication. Because the publication goes with the researcher forever, the researcher doesn’t go with the institute forever. Words are short and time is short.
Quite often, institutes don’t count news coverage that doesn’t cite the institute by name.
[Fraser Cain]
I purposefully cite the institution by name. I do that to literally make the press officer happier. I do this on purpose. I want to be able to dig through their Rolodex and come back again and again and again. And so for me, the press officer is my point of contact that I’m trying to impress. And so I’m trying to get, I want them to come to me with stories and scoops and interesting research that’s happening in their institution.
And then I will also reach out directly to the researcher and then I will want to connect back up so that the press officer is like, oh, I didn’t know that we were doing that, you know, that you were on this podcast. That’s great news. Oh, and hi, Fraser.
Nice to meet you. Yeah. So that’s, you know, I’m working that system.
I have a totally different, I have totally different incentives than you do.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And my point of perspective is I want to call attention to the new ideas and get the paper into the hands of whoever’s reading that wants to get more information. So, so-and-so did such and such, you can find the paper in, is the phrase that I would normally, and I’m saying it. And like I said, I’m going to mispronounce all of it anyways.
[Fraser Cain]
So- There was a fourth thing that universities want?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So the fourth thing that universities want is they want opportunities for students. So if you publish enough papers and you put your students as first author, that totally makes the institute happy. So what we’re currently seeing is institutes often having students as first author on some of these slightly squirrely papers, at least on round one of squirrely paper.
Like I said, these people, once they started in grad school, will often continue down the same route for their career. And so once you have the student doing the work, it’s getting lots of clicks, you’re bringing in money, and you haven’t actually done anything that causes the university to get the kinds of bad press that they have to put out statements about, they’re good.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And so, I mean, you can enrich yourself personally, you can get the book sales, you can get the television appearances, you can get your own television show, and so on and so forth. Being able to walk back to academia, like I said, from my perspective as a journalist, watching this process happen, I have not seen it work. I’ve seen people who have done what I consider to be the honorable step to say, I’m going to detach myself from the academic system so that I can become a science communicator.
I think about Phil Plait, I think about Ethan Siegel, I think about even Paul Sutter, right? That they have the academics, they have the credentials, but they understand that they can’t both be a communicator to the public and a person who is attempting to also fundraise and so on. And then you can see the people who are clearly doing everything they can to maintain a level of balance while keeping a foot in both realms.
And I’m not even going to name names here. And then you can see people who I feel have… They’ve gone to the dark side.
They’ve gone to the dark side. There is no path back that when they come back to academia, academia is going to go, oh, I don’t think we have room for you here anymore. Yeah.
And that’s a really tricky thing because I think it’s heartbreaking for the people who, you know, they wanted to be scientists, but the siren song of publicity and revenue pulls them in other directions.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And what I think has been very interesting is watching people who essentially grew up in the age of blogging and Twitter. Dr. Katie Mack, I think, is someone who’s managing to do excellent science communications and excellent science. And I will name that name.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And I think David Kipping is another example of someone who I think is doing a good job of that. But they are, I think, rare.
And I think are at great risk if they make a misstep of getting high on their own supply. And, you know, for them, I would be very, very careful because there’s a, you know, it’s the, you know, what is it? Hate leads to anger.
Anger leads to whatever. You end up in the dark side, right? And then there’s those who’ve gone all the way.
So. And now we’ve reached the end of our episode. So there you go.
It’s true. Thanks, Pamela.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to all of our $10 a month and higher patrons. You allow us to do everything we do.
This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomycast. This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons. Abraham Cottrell, Alex Rain, Andrew Stevenson, Arno DeGroot, Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Mueller, Bresnik, Bruce Amazine, Claudia Mastriani, Dale Alexander, David Bogarty, Diane Philippon, Dr. Jeff Collins, Iran Zegev, Felix Gut, Frodo Tanimba, Glenn Phelps, Greg Davis, Hannah Tackery, Janelle, Jeanette Wink, Jim Schooler, Joe Holstein, John Thays, Justin Proctor, Katie and Ulyssa, Christian Golding, Laura Kettleson, Lana Spencer, Mark Schneidler, Matthew Horstman, Michael Purcell, Mike Dog, Nate Detweiler, Papa Hot Dog, Paul L.
Hayden, Philip Walker, Robbie the Dog with the Dot, Ruben McCarthy, Sandra Stanz, Scott Briggs, Zege Kemmler, Stephen Miller, The Brain, Tim Girish, Tushar Nakini, Will Feld, and Zero Chill. Thank you all so very much.
[Fraser Cain]
All right. Thanks, Pamela. And we will see you all next week.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Bye-bye, everyone.
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