Slashdot Mirror
Teenager Makes Discovery About Galaxy Distribution
Janek Kozicki writes "It has been long thought that dwarf galaxies orbiting Andromeda galaxy (M31), or any other galaxy for that matter, are distributed more or less randomly around the host galaxy. It seemed so obvious in fact that nobody took time to check this assumption. Until a 15-year-old student, Neil Ibata, working with his father at the astronomic observatory, wanted to check it out. It turned out that dwarf galaxies tend to be placed on a plane around M31. The finding has been published in Nature. Local press (especially in France) is ecstatic that a finding by a 15-year-old got published in Nature. However, there's another more important point: what other obvious things didn't we really bother to check?"
Raises curiosity: how much work is done by this 15-old boy and how much is actually done by his father?
Actually, since the boy has stated in interviews that he wants to leave France and go to college abroad, the press is not that ecstatic. And at least some papers have pointed out that the boy was somehow lucky (even though he most probably is a bright kid).
bother to check?
Stuff that scientists don't want to be mocked by their peers for checking.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It has been long thought that dwarf galaxies orbiting Andromeda galaxy (M31), or any other galaxy for that matter, are distributed more or less randomly around the host galaxy.
[citation needed]
The planets orbit the sun near the ecliptic plane, so if you were to make an assumption about the distribution of galaxies why would you assume galaxies are distributed randomly?
Who woulda thunk, matter in and around a galaxy tends to end up in the accretion disk. Mindblowing.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
According to the French press (who actually interviewed the kid, rather than reported second hand information), he worked as an interm in his father's lab. His father assigned him stuff so as to give him the opportunity to learn how to code.
By the kid's own admittance in those interviews, his primary interest was to learn to code; and he actually puts forward that he did. It's only later that his father and the latter's colleagues highlighted the importance of his program's findings, and they put his name forward in their article (rightly so) for having programmed the tool needed to show their hunch.
Anyway, not discounting how bright the kid might be (because he seems to be, even though he admittedly found it necessary to ask his math teacher for information on vectors), but can we please keep a cool head with respect to what actually happened? As in, a kiddo got an internship through his father and coded stuff requested by his father, and landed his name in a scientific article courtesy of his father for having written said article?
Oh how I hate those pointless debate-starter questions. They come off as so amateur.
The story stands on its own. There's no real possibility that on a Slashdot thread someone's going to come up with an obvious unchecked thing that in any way compares with this discovery. It's not a "point" anyway, it's a query.
Not to mention the summary being incorrect anyway. It states in the article abstract that "t has previously been suspected that dwarf galaxies may not be isotropically distributed around our Galaxy, because several are correlated with streams of Hi emission, and may form coplanar groups. These suspicions are supported by recent analyses." So it's already been known about the Milky Way, this is just further analysis regarding M31, not some kind of revolutionary insight. And it only involves about half of the dwarf satellites, not all of them. Whatever. Carry on.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I think you left the stove on.
Have gnu, will travel.
It works on a Mac.
David Stuart, a gifted Mayan scholar studied under his parents who were both Mayan scholars. By age 18 he had won the MacCarthur Fellowship... it's youngest recipient. "Like Father Like Son" is sometimes an accurate description...While it may be published under his father's name, he might have actually provided something of value. "He's only 15" can hide genius....
See comment below, "Let's not get over ourselves, shall we?"
...what other obvious things we didn't really bother to check?
Well, let's see here:
Economics:
1) Sovereign debt is not like ordinary debt, so it's OK for the US to have a large deficit
2) A little inflation is good (but we can't tell you what the best value actually is)
Medicine:
1) Depression is a disease, and not a consequence of another disorder (as "fever" is)
2) Depression meds actually work
3) Obesity can be fixed by a) diet, b) exercise, or c) eating less
4) Every medical study that hasn't been replicated at least once
Psychology:
1) Seeing a psychiatrist has more benefit than not seeing one
2) Every study which hasn't been replicated at least once (More info)
Social sciences:
1) Every study which hasn't been replicated at least once
Physics, Chemistry, other "hard" sciences:
Nothing, really. Most everything of note has been replicated and confirmed by independent experimenters.
Even Aristotle was found to be wrong, so why not check things? It's even possible some new insight can be gained.
Hey spaceboy, try going where no man has gone before... unless spelunking is your thing?
It occurs to me that we have a similar meme: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, however it can be surprising how long a nasty bugs can survive in code that many people look at (unfortunately). Checking is not as exciting as looking for (or writing) something new.
You forgot to mention the sheeple. Don't forget the sheeple.
Is that this kid isn't Asian, Indian or some other gifted race. Instead, he is just white, sadly white.
Slashdot hypes article as "bright teenage coder does something TEH AWESOMEZ!!1", coders who like to think they were bright teenagers lap it up, ad impressions ensue.
Un-referenced un-provable paranoid accusations; excellent troll.
An anonymous cowards are still less brave than than someone with a minuscule amount of bravery
I guess sales are down where Apple has managed to get a ban on Samsung devices.with its patent lawsuits
Who made the assumption that isotropic is obvious? Gravitation in rotation has always tended toward a common plane. So this would have been my assumption.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
it could be simply that the 70% don't bother - they already know the number to the local pizza parlor.
Like the fact that entire universe is simply a computer simulation being run by our future selves in order to look back in time and understand all of our mistakes? http://news.discovery.com/space/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation-2-121216.html
According to this paper
http://pps.sagepub.com/content/7/6/645.full.pdf
the results of most scientific experiments are not reproduced. So much for science being self correcting.
"Until a 15 year old student, Neil Ibata, working with his father at the astronomic observatory wanted to check it out."
From TFA, "Neil Ibata said he completed work experience with his father’s team to learn about the computer programming language Python.
He told the newspaper Le Monde his father asked him to help out with the coding, and they completed the remarkable modelling within the space of a weekend in September."
My guess is "Boy, aren't you learning Python? C'mere and help me write this for loop" I'm sure half the people here could've wrote a program according to an already-written design when they were 15.
Does this mean Pluto is a planet again? Someone check that data!
There is a theory that antimatter is gravitationally repulsive to matter but attractive to itself. There is also a possibility that some galaxies are made up of antimatter. If this were true and the distribution of matter and antimatter were fine enough so that antimatter galaxies were in the observable universe then a pattern should emerge in the large scale structure of the universe. The pattern of filaments and voids would have two sets of filaments that would never connect. In other words: if you modeled galaxy clusters as nodes and filaments as edges there would be two separate graphs that would never be attached. This would be relatively easy to find (or rule out) in current survey data. Has anyone done this? (In hopes of not sounding like a crank; I am aware of the counter evidence of antimatter galaxies. Namely the lack of gamma radiation caused by annihilation. But that's no reason more counter evidence could not be added to that pile.)
Sovereign debt isn't the core issue, in that debt is neither good nor bad and has some uses.
What I find objectionable is the blanket pronouncement by economists that "it's not like your family debt" as a way of deflecting analysis and criticism of the US government's situation.
It's disingenuous, and it belies the deep problems with the current US policy.
(To contrast, I think that much of our current debt is the bad kind. Of the rest, economists would be better served by saying "it's for *this* purpose and only for a little while, and then we'll pay it down" or similar. But they don't do that.)
I'm not against sovereign debt properly used.
From your answer, you probably understand the issues. I just wanted to make clear that I object to the blanket statement.
Our own genetic weaknesses are probably far more likely to do us in as a race long before the asteroids can hit or global warming could raise the seas enough millimeters to make the planet uninhabitable. Who knows? Maybe our future generations have finally wound down to just a few thousand people living at the bottom of the ocean with a super computer and enough oxygen to live another couple of decades. Maybe they've decided to simulate the universe from conception forward in their supercomputer in order to figure out what went wrong in hopes to undo it. Or, worse, maybe the computers are running the Matrix themselves, and all but a few of us are slaves inside of it, waiting for Neo and Trinity and Morpheus to come and free us all.
When ideas that seem possible come to scientists in general, I'm guessing that they don't generally think, "I know that seems possible, but I'm not going to bother to check." When scientific investigations get funded, they are usually not looking around for anything, but at a specific set of things. So, things get missed. I think this cool kid represents a new force in knowledge through technology, etc, etc. I'm sure it's been defined millions of times somewhere, but basically crowd sourcing brainpower; computer power. What a cool find.
What you say pales against what I've seen with my own eyes.
A researcher ... from a third world country ... discovered a really wonderful substance from a deep sea shell fish.
That thing can really block pain, without causing any drowsiness, or any adverse side effect.
The person reported his finding to his professor, who seized the chance to publish the finding.
On the published article, no where the name of the original researcher was mentioned.
The substance was later patented, and the patent is worth BILLIONS ... and guess what?
That original researcher got nothing. Not even one single red penny.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Maybe I am wrong, but I wonder how a 21% oxygen content in the air can help us breath and survive, while only .039% of carbon dioxide is enough for the survival of plants. Someone can explain?
Astronomy and mathematics are two of the remaining professional academic disciplines that are still open to significant contributions from amateurs, hobbyists, and other unaffiliated individuals. This is likely to do with the nature of research in those fields, such as the fact that almost everyone has access to the sky, or the ability to experiment with abstract mathematical ideas. It is not just about things professionals have not 'bothered to check', but rather there is still so much to learn out there in astronomy and mathematics that people from a wide variety vocations can "stumble" across new discoveries. See this list of amateur mathematicians and their original/primary vocations. You have primary school teachers, lawyers, an innkeeper, as well as engineers and scientists from other fields and many many more.
I encourage everyone who has an interest in astronomy and/or mathematics to dabble in those areas with the understanding that they too can still make new discoveries. Try joining your local astronomy club, or an amateur mathematics society , or just keep dabbling and observing, and don't think "I could never make a real discovery," because it is possible.
I got to the age of 26 before I discovered that shallots were not small fish. It is the only time (so far) that I have been ruthlessly mocked by both my parents and a waitress at the same time.
Makes you wonder what else you've got horribly wrong...
I mean shit, no one should answer, " i dont know " any more, search it on google before damn asking
Google is the library of alexadria
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
At first, I thought it was cool. Some classic story of a young kid defying odds in his back yard, or whatever.
Then I realized he's a kid with access to a lot of resources and an observatory... not nearly as impressive.
Reminds me of the old fable. Sometimes all it takes is someone who isn't deeply immersed in a subject to come along and point out what has been under your nose all along (see also "wood for the trees") Of course when someone does it to you and you're supposed to the "expert" a lot of people get all huffy and defensive as if it's a personal insult. Which it isn't.
This is why it's also sometimes best to have a troublesome problem looked at by "a second pair of eyes" as they might spot the "elephant inf the room" that you've actually been sitting on all along.
Right that's quite enough clichés for one morning.... Let's face it. At the end of the day you've sometimes got to do your blue sky thinking inside the box :)
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
The summary shows the typical engineers contempt for scientists. Its only "Really obvious" in hindsight. The notion that scientists have "Not bothered to check" is insulting and ignorant. We are dealing with a vast parameter space, and especially in astronomy very little data. Likely that someone has thought of this before, but couldn't produce a publishable result.
People scoffing at science in this manner, regardless of what they believe, sound very much like young Earth Creationists.
I would say that virtually every sub discipline has one.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
No one in the mass media bothered to vet the communist in the White House. If a Republican had been elected in 2008, we'd know everything about him. But, it's OK to be fake American citizen if you're a "clean" negro (Joe Biden said it).
" what other obvious things didn't we really bother to check?"
Ah, it's the old working-with-humans thing, again.
I 100% believe that you were associated with wikipedia (based on what passes as civilized debate over there). I also believe that you were labeled "autistic". I'm sure it continues to happen.
As for the rest of this screed, you *may* be insane or have a personality disorder. You should get that looked at.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Whether or not dark matter is a calculation error before having celebrity scientists make a dozen specials about it made out of 95% theoretical fluff BS.
Challenging existing beliefs and theories is what it's all about.
The age of the person is of no importance, the field of discovery is of no importance, what is important is "science".
Hip-hip-hoorah!
.. when I were a kid, my mother would distribute us randomly on a plane, _but we knew_ our grandma was waiting on the other end with 2 months worth of chores for us.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
distributed more or less randomly around the host galaxy
Surely this is a silly thing to say. Sure, the *amount of randomness* might have been assumed to be fairly high - which simply means the "difficulty in determining predictability". Or that nobody has bothered to think about it. So of course they're not "randomly" distributed. Nothing is "randomly" anything. The assumption should always be "we just haven't discovered a pattern yet."
So these researchers didn't have a "hunch it might not be random". They had a hunch that they could lower the level of unpredictability.
I wish these things were reported in a ways which didn't contribute to ignorance about how the world works.
No use to diminish his achievement. He didn't deny that it was "beginer's luck", but it's still HIS discovery. Not the one of his father or anybody else.
Lucky or not, it's quite an important discovery.
Now, there's a question I'm wondering. I've searched "neil ibata" on google. A lot of sites talk about this, in every languages. But the only english-speaking sites are not american (except slashdot). If Neil Ibata was american, wouldn't there be much more american websites to cover that information ?
It's not the first time I notice something like that. When an american scientific find something : "it's revolutionary", when he's foreign : "that's not very important".