RALEIGH, N.C. — Astronomy has a long tradition of embracing April first with research papers presented alongside more serious ones on subjects like planetary seismology and recent discoveries via the James Web Telescope. Each has all the same markings including ISO standard Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) and guidance on how it should be cited by studies that build on it.
This year, a group of researchers from the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory have apparently been staring at pixilated images of exoplanets long enough that they've decided these distant planets orbiting stars outside our solar system “
do not exist,” explaining instead that they are actually square stars or “squars.”
The paper even offers an artist rendition of one member of the “squellar population,” generated in Minecraft of course.
Three Aprils ago, Lund showed similar correlation between nights he was attempting to use the telescopes at the Palomar Observatory and rain. He concluded the solution to drought across southern California was to
give him more telescope time.
Some of the best tongue-in-cheek papers are those that demonstrate reasonably good math and science, but focus on mundane topics.
Eva Armstrong of the New York Institute of Technology answers the question, why physicists shouldn’t write fairytales in
The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. The paper, published on April 1, 2022, examines the stability of each pig’s house based on Newton’s laws of motion.
In 2021, Heloise Stevance of The University of Auckland, New Zealand wrote of her research classifying Britain’s favorite tea time treat in
Using Artificial Intelligence to Shed Light on the Star of Biscuits: The Jaffa Cake. The paper is filled with impressive charts and graphs concluding with caution about assuming artificial intelligence is magically capable of more than each model was trained to do. Stevance is careful to visually define the cakes and "biscuits" considered in her study noting that what we call biscuits are scones to her and the rest of Britain.
Some of the papers are just … out there.
2012’s
On the Influence of the Illuminati in Astronomical Adaptive Optics by Katie Morzinski and Jared Males of the Steward Observatory. The paper compares the “astronomical rise” of Britney Spears and Lady Gaga to recent technical improvements in “ground-based diffraction-limited astronomical imaging” concluding that both are explained by “the Illuminati”
Also in 2021, authors from the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins University published their study of
Detection of Rotational Variability in Floofy Objects at Optical Wavelengths. The 11 page paper is impressive in its commitment to the joke. It never directly says those “floofy objects” are cats but instead define a measure of image noise as the product of C (contrast) A (area of the camera sensor), and T (throughput).
The “fluffy objects” in figure 2 look familiar.
Pluto and April Fools day
It’s not just blogs and billionaires getting in on the fun.
Famed and respected British astronomer, Patrick Moore announced on his The Sky at Night radio program that a rare conjunction of Pluto and Jupiter would weaken Earth’s gravity on April 1, 1976 at precisely 9:47 a.m. London time.
The time came and went with nothing happening of course, but that didn’t stop people from claiming otherwise. The
BBC was flooded with calls including one from a woman who said she and her 11 friends “wafted from their chairs and orbited gently around the room” during morning tea.
Like most good hoaxes, this one is based in a bit a truth. Planetary alignments, any large enough body is space really, can create very small, unusual gravitational effects. We see this each new and full moon when the high tide is a bit higher and low tide a bit lower as the Earth, Moon, and Sun are in a line and pulling in the same direction. Oceanographers call this spring and neap tides. Astronomers call the alignment syzygy.
