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."

Comments

Why Brown didn't report earlier

[rdwald]

A lot of people are saying, "Well, if Dr. Brown wanted to get the credit, he should have announced the discovery as soon as he made it." I like Dr. Brown's response on why waiting benefits not only the scientific community but also the public at large:

Consider, for example, the instantaneous Ortiz et al. announcement of the existence of 2003 EL61. Headlines in places like the BBC web site breathlessly exclaimed "new object may be twice the size of Pluto." But even at the time we knew that 2003 EL61 had a satellite and was only 30% the mass of Pluto. We quickly got the truth out, but just barely. Sadly, other interesting aspects of 2003 EL61 also got lost in the shuffle. No one got to hear that it rotates every 4 hours, faster than anything else known in the Kuiper belt. Or how that fast rotation causes it to be shaped like a cigar. Or how we use the existence of the satellite to calculate the mass. All of these are interesting things that would have let the public learn a bit more about the mysteries of physics and of the solar system. In the press you get one chance to tell the story. In the case of the instantaneous announcement of 2003 EL61 the story was simply "there is a big object out there." We are saddened by the lost opportunity to tell a richer scientific story and to have the public listen for just one day to a tale that included a bit of astronomy, a bit of physics, and a bit of detective story.

discovering someone else's data isn't a discovery

[EccentricAnomaly]

And now, they want to claim credit for the discovery of the object because, essentially, they were the first ones to publish the existence but not the data for the new object

Brown had no problem with Ortiz beating him on the announcement and gave Ortiz full credit for the discovery... until he found out Ortiz used his data... then he had a problem.

If Brown had waited with his announcement, then Ortiz couldn't have searched for the images on the web.

But he wanted to present it at a conference, which meant he had to submit an abstract.

I don't know whether Ortiz committed scientific misconduct

well he did. He used Brown's data without attribution.

but there is obviously something wrong with what Brown did: his abstract shouldn't have contained identifiable information, and/or he should have asked to be kept private.

ok Brown made a mistake, but that doesn't mean its ok to steal his data. That's like saying it's ok to rob a house that left its door open... or to steal a print out of his data that he left lying on his desk. It's misconduct to take someone else's work and pass it off as your own.

Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.

That's bullshit. 1) An abstract isn't the whole paper, and you don't put data or results in an abstract 2) he had the data when he wrote the abstract 3) it is perfectly reasonable (and common practice) to submit an abstract before all of the work is done, its just an abstract not a whole paper.

in no way is what Brown did misconduct. What Ortiz et al did is some of the worst kind of misconduct. He stole Brown's work and passed it off as his own. Ortiz and his whole group should be fired and should never work as astronomers again. If his institution doesn't fire him they will lose all credibility.

To me, it looks like both Brown and Ortiz made serious mistakes. So far, however, I haven't seen any concrete evidence for misconduct in this story.

Brown made a dumb mistake of not protecting his data. Ortiz made an ethical mistake of stealing that data. I cannot understand why you don't think what Ortiz et al did was not misconduct.

I don't understand why so many slashdotters are defending Ortiz. It's just like someone taking GPL code from a CVS server and passing it off as thier own without mentioning where they got the code and after they're caught, saying its ok because the project was taking forever to make an official release.