Lab Notes: When astronomers make mistakes

[laughs] Yeah, Astronomy Telegram has this kind of vibe of it being very historic, very-

[laughs]

... old-timey, back-in-the-day.

Uh, that's not the case at all.

This is very recently, so we're talking the last, like, 5, 10 years or so.

So the Astronomy Telegram is not waiting for us to go through the full peer review process.

It's not processing all the data and understanding everything.

It's, "We've found something new.

It wasn't here.

If you're interested, here's where you can look at it."

It's like a, a message board or a WhatsApp chat.

Exactly, yeah.

A slightly, a slightly, uh, faster and, uh, less formal notification, yeah.

And what happened on the 20th of March, 2018? [laughs]

So, uh, there's a very famous telegram, as you said.

It comes out, astronomer saying, "Look at this.

There's a really exciting thing where it's very bright.

We've looked through all of our data, wasn't there before.

We've gone through catalogs and just, just confirmed that it doesn't, you know, match up with any of these well-known galaxies." And so just a, a cheeky 40 minutes later, uh, an erratum, a little amendment, a little asterisk, if you will, was added [laughs] of, "Don't worry, we've actually figured it out, and it's Mars."

It's Mars.

It's Mars, yeah.

Uh, and this is a real problem.

We kinda get so focused on the stars and the galaxies.

We're looking at things that are billions of light years away.

The biggest problem as well is the, the things in our solar system, they're also moving at different rates to everything else in the rest of the sky.