…2012, when I was working at the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea. Among the videos we had to play for the public was one starring an astronomer named Phil Plait, author of the popular Bad Astronomy blog, dedicated to debunking all the crazy ideas people come up with regarding astronomy, or just explaining astronomy to the public in general. In the video he engages in charming Myth Busters-esque hijinks, like trying to stop a scale-model comet of dry ice and water ice by shining a laser on it, or investigating whether shooting an asteroid with a nuke would be a good idea (it's not). He's written a book (called “Bad Astronomy”), he's been on TV, he's got over 600,000 followers on Twitter, the point is that he's pretty good at communicating science effectively.
Jumping forward in time to this past January, I wrote my first article for Astrobites. I picked a paper from 2016 about some astronomers who accidentally observed the wrong star, then discovered it was a previously-unknown solar twin. It made for a great story about serendipity in science, and it fit with my Ph.D. project. I wrote and re-wrote it for a period of several weeks, and was pretty happy with the result.
Fast forward to this afternoon, when I discovered (via a colleague) that Phil Plait had come upon the same paper, thought about writing about it on his blog, discovered my Astrobite, and thought it good enough to simply retweet rather than write his own post:
I don't really have much more to say about this other than: wow. This made my day. Soli Deo gloria! A hui hou!I found an article about the accidental discovery of a solar twin, a star almost exactly like the Sun. I was going to write it up for the blog, but AstroBites already did a great job! This is pretty cool: https://t.co/0zxmfXm7R8— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) March 6, 2018
That's a real honour and very encouraging! Congratulations.š
ReplyDeleteThanks Meredith. It's definitely very encouraging. :)
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