[left]WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS THREAD?
I've wanted to do this for a long time. The goal here is to give accurate (better if it is peer-reviewed than not) and updated (recent, or if old at least giving context to the status of the debate) scientific references about astrophysical and statistical parameters of solar system, exoplanetary, stellar and galactic populations, to help improve the scientific realism of SpaceEngine. This means to keep track of the developements in the scientific literature to help Vladimir Romanyuk improve and adjust the software towards a more up-to-date and rigorous representation of reality (more like scientific consensus about reality really).[/left]
[left]WHAT IS THIS NOT ABOUT?
This is not a thread about singular fixes on, or the addon of, a new astronomical object in the catalogues. Here we should not talk about the discovery of a new exoplanet, or about an update on a more accurate eccentricity value for the orbit of a particular asteroid. For that kind of scientific updates in SpaceEngine you can check and contribute to these threads:[/left]
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- Community addons - Exoplanets
- Community addons - Stars
- Community addons - Binary stars
- Community addons - Binary asteroids
- Community addons - Object descriptions
[left]This is also not the place to talk about new scientific discoveries that are not for SpaceEngine implementation (e.j. "dark matter is made of a new kind of neutrino", "study suggest we live in a multiverse" etc..) or other qualitative scientific proposals that lack a specific way of been visualized in SE or are just in still speculative phase. For that you might want to check these threads:[/left]
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[left]This is also not the place for scientific updates that require the addition of an entirely new feature on the engine (e.j. specific rate of motion in plate tectonics, typical heights of vertical warps in planetary rings, etc...). For that you have these threads:[/left]
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[center]RULES OF THE THREAD:[/center]
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- Please, don't fill it with off-topic information (read the previous "what is this not about?" section), let's keep it relevant and readable for the developers of SpaceEngine to easily grab what they need.
- Try to use peer-review articles or reliable original sources. Please don't post pop-science articles as a source unless you are unable to find the original paper and think the information is relevant enough.
- It would be nice if we use recent sources and advancements. But if they are old at least make it clear what is the state of the debate on the topic (perhaps your source is entirely dismissed in the current scientific consensus because it is unreliable and other have proven it to be wrong). In some cases there has not been anything published on a topic for decades and that might imply that the old source is still relevant as a reference.
- It would be nice if you could add not only specific values but also uncertainties. For example, if we find a paper about the frequency of large moons around giant planets, having the value is fine but it is even better to know how thin or thick the bell curve is (what the uncertainties mean in general) so it can be implemented in SpaceEngine in a probabilistic way (instead of having the same number of large moons around giant planets we also want to know how much we can deviate in the number of large moons upwards and downwards for procedural generation to have the variety observed in nature).
- We can also debate around a reference and its methods if you want, in many cases the scientific consensus has not yet been reached so different contradicting values might appear. We can discuss what is the best option to maximise the realism and reliability of SpaceEngine in that sense.
[left]TIPS FOR DIVING INTO THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE:
We often find an interesting claim in a news-outlet and want to check for the original scientific paper it is based on. In general this should be mentioned somewhere but sometimes it is not. A very powerfull tool we use when we want track the literature is NASA's Astrophysycial Data System. The ADS is a massive international database containing scientific publications and references that is the standard for these kind of bibliographic searches. You can search for the title, the year, the authors, etc... Sometimes, when you are reading a blogpost without a reference, you can see things like, "Mr. XXX says that blah blah blah.."; you can search for "Mr. X" in the ADS and filter by date until you find a publication related to that topic. Or perhaps you just found a paper in the ADS and want to know if it is part of the current scientific consensus: then you can check the "Citations" of that paper (the other papers that came after it and mentioned this particular research) in the ADS. In some cases you will find that in the citing papers there are debunks of the original paper, in other cases you will find that they agree. Somethimes it is enough to read the citation count to understand the relevance of a paper in the scientific community (but bare in mind that recent papers have lower citation counts even if they are extremely relevant just because there has been little time since their publication for others to add new corroborating evidence and cite them).
Another very powerfull tool we use, and I should alert you that this is piracy (which I'm totally okay with in the context of scientific journals), is the Sci-hub. The ADS lets you see the papers in their original and alternative publication sites. If they are in Arxiv then you don't have to worry, almost all astrophysical research is alternatively published there and it is freely available in pdf format. But in some cases you are only able to access the paper if you subscribe to a journal (wich have not-at-all cheap payments, unless you are an entire scientific institution that has to grant formal access to the papers of other researchers). That is why Sci-hub was born. It allows you to get free access to those paywall papers. The only thing you have to do is go to the ADS, search for the paper, copy the DOI (which is an international identifier of the article) and past it in the Sci-hub search engine. As I said Sci-hub is a pirate web-site, so it is constantly changeing adress. You can always find in Google a few adresses that work and others that are just blocked by some country or another.[/left]
