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One Find, Two Astronomers
Malacon writes "The New York Times is running a story about
Debate Between Astronomers who both claim to have discovered the same object beyond Pluto, and almost the same size. Apparantly the US Astronomers had been tracking it for quite some time, but chose to not report it yet. They also claim the Spanish Astronomers stole data to make the find."
The debate is who found it first. Brown says he has logs that Ortiz visited his web site with information on his telescope's position right before he made the discovery. I don't think its as much an allegation of stolen data as much as lack of integrity.
Mike Brown has placed a rather detailed timeline of events (from his perspective) on his webpage:
i z/
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/ort
IMHO the ball is in Ortiz' court now...
If you'll actually RTFA, you'll notice that the webserver hosting the information on where the telescope was pointing had the IP address of the Spanish researchers in its log files. More specifically, the Spanish astronomers jumped straight through to the page with the telescope coordinates listed for the particular object ID number that was also used in the published abstract. They didn't just randomly browse and chance upon it, but directly returned to the page multiple times within a day or so of when they anounced that they had "found" the object.
So Dr. Brown was negligent in that the data was publically (albeit difficultly) accessible, but that doesn't mean that Dr. Ortiz's stealing of the data was at all moral. It's pretty sleazy to take credit for somebody else's hard work without even acknowledgements.
Mike Brown makes some comments in his web page:
On discovery of new planet
I really shouldn't hotlink it w/o written consent from the author, but...heck, CalTech ought to be able to handle the load. Anyway, I make no extra comment of my own on this incident, but you guys might want to read up why the US guys did what and how they did.
Dupe-tastic
From the blurb:
However, even more interesting is the intrigue behind the press conferences revealing Xena earlier this year. It seems that, using the astronomers' own observation logs (publicly available over the Web) and some key details inadvertently revealed in earlier announcements, someone was planning on 'discovering' the objects first and claiming credit. This was why the scientists 'pre-announced' the existence of Xena back in July, to establish priority.
At least Zonk didn't do it (for once).
That worked great when all scientists were rich aristocrats. Now, any peasant can be a scientist and compete for funding...
It's even worse when the allocation of funding is based not on scientific merit but on alignment with some political party or movement. [grumble]
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
"I really shouldn't hotlink it w/o written consent from the author, but..."
Excuse me for the off-topic rant, but... since when is pointing people to a publicly displayed document wrong?
from my Astronomy professor, who met recently with the chair of the IAU, is that they are going to declare a "historical" definition of the term planet, which includes Pluto but does not include objects like Sedna or UB313. Thus, it becomes the perogative of the discoverer to name UB313 whatever they so desire (which is why who discovered it first is then an important issue.)
the old article didn't mention the Ortiz connection...
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Why does it take so long to announce these discoveries?