Papers are submitted!

It's been six months (plus a few days) since I arrived back in Hilo, and yesterday was a pretty significant milestone for me: I finally submitted the two papers that form the basis of my thesis to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society! While the papers were mostly written before I moved (indeed, they've been being written for literally years now), they went through a long period of editing and refinement and rewriting since, and even had some new sections added along the way. (Including just this past week!) It mostly took so long because I was having to do it on weekends and holidays and weeknights after work, but it's finally done.

My two papers were submitted along with another two (including one to Science) by people in the solar twins method research group as part of a coordinated wave, revealing the method I spent my PhD establishing and its results: a constraint on variation in the fine-structure constant nearly 100 times more precise than the current best constraints from astronomy. (At some point in the future I'd like to write a post series explaining my PhD work in simplified terms, so I won't go into detail here just yet.)

This is just the first step; from here the papers will go to peer review (assuming they're accepted, but I don't expect that to be an issue), and probably within a few weeks or months I'll get them back and have to make changes for the final published versions. The upshot, however, is that—for now—I actually have free time, for basically the first time since moving. I'm luxuriating this evening in the lack of a feeling in the back of my mind that I really ought to be working on my papers, for the first time in over half a year (I've got other things I need to get done that I've been putting off to work on my papers, but now I can finally start checking them off.)

It's a significant milestone for a few reasons: for the solar twins method, as these papers will establish its validity and open it up to the wider research community, allowing people to build on it in the future. And for me, I'm finally getting to share all the work I've been doing for the past 4½ years beyond the handful of people involved. Many, perhaps the majority, of PhD students in astronomy already have several papers published by the time they get their degrees, so it's validating to finally have my work published as well. (Due to the nature of my establishing the solar twins method almost from scratch, it didn't really make sense to publish results along the way; instead we needed to have everything done to prove everything worked before we could really publish any of it.) With my papers submitted (and eventually published), I'm also finally going to start having more free time to begin recovering from the past few years of nigh-unrelenting stress and toil, and start getting to enjoy living in Hawaii again. I'm bursting with ideas of things to do and create and try, and hopefully that'll translate to more posts this year sharing the results of those ideas. Maybe not immediately, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's more than just the point it's been for years. A hui hou!