Publishing

By Aaron on October 17, 2007 at 11:02 pm | In Blog Posts |

I’ve had a paper accepted for publication in the December, 2007 issue of PASP, a top tier astronomy journal. You can read it here. (Notice a fellow slackerpede in the coauthor list.)

This is only my second primary authored paper in a major astronomy journal. My others have all been in smaller journals. Many were refereed journals of good quality, but they tend to be limited in scope and/or size. PASP is a general astronomy journal. But even it has some areas where it is more known, two examples of which are astronomical equipment and variable stars. My paper, naturally, involves the latter.

SS Cyg is one of the most popular variable stars. It’s a binary system where a white dwarf is pulling material from a smaller, red dwarf companion. The material builds up in an accretion disc and leads to an eventual outburst, where the star grows in brightness by around 4 magnitudes or so. It’s fun to watch SS Cyg in a backyard telescope. Day after day it is faint, then one day BOOM, it’s one of the brightest stars in the field.

The best part is that we don’t know exactly why this occurs nor can we predict it with better than ~20% accuracy.

In 2005, I suckered invited some amateur observers to observe SS Cyg as much as possible, all night long, for four months. They observed many hours per night, in V and Ic (near infrared) filters. The idea was to look for any kind of activity that could be a precursor to an outburst.

The four months stretched into two years thanks to the dedication of this team (who are all coauthors on the paper). Thousands of observing hours were spent on this star. I don’t know of any star that has had this much coverage (other than our Sun of course). The amount of data broke our web server half way through the campaign! And it took me 4 weeks of 40-hour/week work just to clean the data and get it into a state to be analyzed.

The paper was written as part of an independent study class with a professor in the physics department at Tufts. A draft was done in May, polished over the summer and submitted in mid June. The referee returned comments about a week after submission. It took me about two weeks to respond to the comments and resubmit. After that, another week for notification of official acceptance and assignment of a publication date.

The result? We didn’t find a precursor. But we learned a ton and were able to place lots of limits. The referee said it would be an “important contribution” to SS Cyg. Lots of science (most?) is null results. But the null results lead to the positive results. We did find one significant result in the paper, though. There is a correlation between intervals between outbursts and a long (>1000 day) period in the long-term light curve of SS Cyg.

We are planning to apply for a grant to expand this project for three years. The goal will be to constrain the models even more with better and more precise coverage.

This will probably be my last primary-authored astronomy research paper in many years as I shift focus to education and psychology research. I have one more paper that is pending my corrections to a referee report, but I don’t know if that will happen given my time constraints. And I have one more idea in my head that I really want to do, because it would be fun and neat. But, again, time probably won’t let it happen. I have my first field study in the social sciences planned for this January at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. After that, I’ll need to analyze and publish THAT data. Dealing with human subject data is a completely different world than data from the natural sciences. Even the statistical methods are different.

Onward… and upward?