TAPIR Seminar

In person: 370 Cahill -- Attendees joining in person must have a valid Caltech UID.

To Join via Zoom: 864 8902 5566

ABSTRACT: I will share results spanning science to the science of science; from galaxy-CGM coupling mechanisms to large-scale citation trends in astronomy. First I will discuss theoretical processes governing gas accretion onto galaxies, and how hot-mode accretion may be conducive to the formation of thin galactic disks. The discussion will become more meta as I move to discuss the accuracy of scientific methodology---results from a mock-data challenge for parameter estimation of absorption systems. We will be firmly in science-of-science territory by the third part of the talk, where the topic is large-scale textual analysis of ADS abstracts. I will show that if you rank astronomy papers by number of other, pre-existing, textually-similar papers, then the upper 50th percentile is cited nearly twice as often as the lower 50th percentile.