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Could the proposal Scientific Imagination be kind of a duplicate of Astronomy?
There is this new proposal that is quite hot on Area51 now. Scientific Imagination. As it's description says, it is for the people who are interested in questions involving imaginary scenarios and scientific, educational, and fun answers for those questions.
I found some questions that might be on-topic here:

What would happen if the sun was instantly replaced by a black hole with the same mass?
If objects in Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud could be amassed to a single planet, what would it be like?
If we count Avagadro's Number of stars that are closest to Earth, how big that space would be?

However the difference of this from Stack Exchange science sites is, the proposal is intended to be like what-if.xkcd.com. So it does not only ask for answers, but also invites answerers to let loose their imagination.
Do any of you think this proposal could be a partial duplicate of Astronomy?

I made a comment to that effect at the Scientific Imagination proposal. There are a lot of questions there that would be on-topic here, or on other SE sites. The only quibble I would have with a question being on Scientific Imagination would be if it could be answered much better on another science SE, which is the case with the questions you referenced above.

@HDE226868: The issue is, there is a danger that all of these example questions can be quickly closed as off topic, as they do no represent a real life scenario.

The first two questions you listed would actually be frowned upon here as too hypothetical. The last one would be ok.

The second is certainly too hypothetical, but I would argue that the first one is on-topic here if and only if the OP wanted to know about, say, the effects on the orbits of the planets - i.e. gravitational effects. For example, there is a question on Astronomy.SE called "What would be the effects on Earth if Jupiter was turned into a star?", which sees awfully similar, yet garnered 149+ views, four answers, and two votes. Then again, I don't have the rep to see if there were any "close" votes against it.

Amending my last comment: I now have the rep and have found that as of this moment, there are no close votes against it.


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Why don't we have a page in the help center on $\LaTeX$ notation?
Many new users don't know how to use $\LaTeX$. Generally, if they write a mathematically-heavy post that needs $\LaTeX$ but doesn't have it, another user will either edit the post, show them to a page in the help center detailing how to use it, or, hopefully, both.
The issue is, we don't have that page.
There's one on Physics, as well as Mathematics. Why don't we have one? It seems just as necessary.

It does seem like a good idea. I will see what I can do.
In the meantime, please use those references as well as these:
How do I add mathematical notation using MathJax (World Building)
MathJax tutorial and quick reference (Math)

Thanks. I saw that Worldbuilding post (and contributed quite a lot to starting it!). We don't need something that detailed, do we? The reason we set that up was because many people on Wolrdbuilding aren't too science/math oriented and are more likely to be unfamiliar with it.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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Should we have a blog?
As some of you might know, Worldbuilding Stack Exchange has a blog, which we call Universe Factory. Though less active than it was when it started up a couple of years ago, we still manage 2-3 post per month, in general. It's been a great community building strategy, and has managed to bring together users interested in disparate topics, as well as attracting non-users to the site, through reading or writing blog posts.
I've seen a lot of questions recently on Astronomy that make me think "Hey, this is cool. But what about [X, Y, Z]? I'd like to learn more about that." For example, this question about mapping the Milky way via HI regions made me wonder, among other things, about how assumptions of non-Keplerian orbits would change certain calculations. In some cases, a follow-up question would be appropriate, but in others, there's just too much information to discuss.
What would it look like?
Stack Exchange no longer hosts blogs, meaning that if a community wants to start its own, it has to go off-site (and make the blog unofficial, although SE will likely say "Yeah, it's okay to do that."). Worldbuilding and Science Fiction & Fantasy are probably the two communities which have the highest-visibility blogs. SFF's uses a WordPress site, as I understand it, while  Worldbuilding uses Medium, a blogging platform that I think makes contributing to a group blog much easier. I certainly like it.
Worldbuilding has lots and lots of information on the site meta about how the blog works, but I can summarize the technical details:

We have our own "publication" on medium.com.
A small set of users have editor status, meaning they are the ones who can launch posts. At least one should be a site moderator (in the case of Worldbuilding, two of us are).
Anyone can write a blog post (although they okay it with the blog team first); they just need to set up an account on Medium.
We update a meta post and the Community Bulletin (which requires a mod) to promote the current post(s).

Essentially, it's a third-party host, and an unofficial blog, but all of the important information is open to the community on the site. We even have a chat room for coordinating and planning posts.
What could we write about?
Both sites have their own types of posts. SFF includes movie reviews, discussions of conventions and related events, editorials, etc. Worldbuilding often has posts about worldbuilding tips, as well as original short stories. For a putative Astronomy Stack Exchange blog, I'm thinking of a couple different types of possible posts:

Reviews of interesting papers (as I write this, I realize that Astrobites does this, aimed at an undergrad audience, although we could target broader or other niche sets of readers)
Discussions of specialized and maybe esoteric terminology (e.g. a post on speckle imaging, although I guess that's not so esoteric)
Talking about a user's own active research
Information about outreach and public events

The level the post is written at would be up to the author's discretion, and would likely vary based on the topic.
But why should we do it?
Well . . . I think it would be a decent method of community building and community promotion. We're not a huge site - although we're still healthy - and I've been looking for a number of ways in which we could grow and become stronger, and hopefully reach a wider audience. A blog would be an easy enough way to do this, and it could be fun.
What do people think? Should we try this out? If so, are there any changes we should make to the model I've proposed? Any other thoughts?

I'm open to the idea--not sure if there is sufficient interest around here, but more community involvement would be good if this is an effective way of getting there.

I'm a big supporter of Should we revive the Topic of the Week? and would happily participate in that. Maybe every two weeks, or a pair of topics each month might be better. I don't know how to publicize the topics using the SE feature available in a beta site. But writing blog posts means time and effort since they tend to be longer and are expected to be more carefully prepared and edited than an SE question or answer post, so my guess is that people would hesitate to put in the effort to write something good on a peripheral site.

I think SE has converged to a kind of sweet spot in community building, bringing readers to a central location, voting, comments, follow-up questions, bells, whistles, etc. To enhance the community, I'd recommend doing things right here where the traffic is already maximum, rather than forking.

I think this is a fun idea, and I might participate.

I really like this idea. If enough users participate, then it's definitely worth doing.

I think we have a big enough positive response that it is time to secure commitments from prospective writers. As Jan mentions in the comments, perhaps another meta question would be the best way to do that. Really, we only need one or two writers to make it work as long as they can post regularly enough.

Good idea; done. https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/q/470/2153

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What in the world do we do with this question?
I'm talking about this one, posted in min-January. When I came to the site in August, it had been stagnant for a while, and two months later, nothing has changed (not that I would expect something to, but still).
Here's the transcript of it:

Are HgMn (peculiar A type) stars really possess global magnetic fields? See, for example, paper Hubrig et al. 2012: http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2910

Now, I said in a comment

My interpretation of the question (and of course correct me if I'm wrong) was that @user2579566 was asking if the magnetic fields exist on these stars, due to the ongoing debate in the scientific community. Is that the case, or am I off-track?

And the answer was yes.
Here's the problem, which I found out in August after a long time searching the web: nobody knows. We don't have any evidence that proves the existence of magnetic fields on these stars - which is the whole reason user2579566 asked the question!
I'm worried that the question might eventually get deleted, as low-activity, low-votes (well, this one did decently) questions occasionally are. It might be answerable at some point in time. But at the moment, it isn't. And I'm reluctant to write an answer outlining all the reasons why we don't know one way or the other.
What should we do?

As with most science, we don't necessarily seek to prove absolutely, but simply to understand to the best of our current ability. Even general relativity, the basis for much of our beliefs in astronomy is a theory. As such, when someone asks a question like this, sometimes the answer to that question can legitimately be "We don't know" or "We're not sure" (though hopefully with a bit greater detail).
When we have new research challenging old previous beliefs, even if the new research is absolutely correct, it takes a while for that to diffuse through the scientific community through time or repeated experiments. While we may think of an 'answer' as something which is absolute, this isn't how science works and we really shouldn't place ourselves in that situation.
For a question like this, I would take this route:

State that it's an area of active research.
Summary of previously accepted belief, and the evidence that supported that belief.
Summary of the recent research which challenges the accepted belief and that challenge's merits.

If there isn't really new research, but there is still debate:

Introduce belief A.
Introduce belief B.
Compare merits.

Perhaps the asker won't necessarily be satisfied with an answer that isn't definitive.  However, an answer that presents two competing theories is far more informative than an no answer. If new research comes out, then the answer can be edited, or replaced. That's part of the SE model, after all.

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Why was my question marked as "subjective"?
This is in regards to a question I posted recently:

Note: As I typed up the title to this question, the reminder box popped up on the right and said something along the lines of "This question is subjective and likely to be closed." Two thoughts of mine that could end up in meta: First off, is this question too subjective? Second, why did this appear? What keywords could possibly have set it off?

Why did the box pop up?

With a little experimenting, it appears to be triggered by the words "do you" word "you" in the title. I can understand how they might think that the result would be subjective, but it doesn't seem like a solid teller. You can find the triggering words and the regex responsible for filtering for them in this Meta SE question.
As for your question, I don't think it would be considered subjective outside of the filter. You could replace "do you" with "does one" and get the same meaning and avoiding the filter, though this is really just semantics.

First of all, read this. If after reading it you still think asking subjective questions on this site is a good idea, I suggest you start a discussion and try to bring your administrators, community managers, and users on board. That specific part of the question validation can be turned off on a per-community basis, should you succeed.

Are you saying my question was too subjective?

Not as it stands currently. But it had to contain something that tripped up the algorithm that checks for subjective stuff

I'm guessing that was the "Do you" part, like Mitch said. By the way, the link was very helpful.


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Sandbox suggestion
We've had some long, complex and LaTeX-heavy answers recently, and so I'm suggesting that we create a thread a la this post on Math.SE. I doubt this will be used much, but there's a chance it could work in the future.
Suggested guidelines:
In general, see the ones posted on the Math thread. Here are some of the important points:

Make posts community wiki.
Do not make too many - perhaps set a limit here.
Do not expect your work to stay alive forever, escaping deletion.
When done, add a message indicating that the post is free, and delete your old work.

Note that SE already stores drafts of posts every few minutes, once they meet some minimum required length to enable that feature. Those drafts are then available to you when you reopen the thread you were writing it in, or can be dismissed. It's also possible to force draft saving on demand via a user script.

[object Object]

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Worldbuilding's writing a blog post about TRAPPIST-1. What should we include in it?
Yes, this meta question is on the right site. Trust me.
Worldbuilding Stack Exchange has a blog, and it was suggested that we put together a post about the recent discovery of four more planets around TRAPPIST-1. I'm going to try to write it up the next couple days, and we'll probably publish it in a couple weeks (though no promises).
We also want to steal take inspiration from content on Astronomy Stack Exchange about TRAPPIST-1, especially since we've gotten a slew of questions about it in the last 24 hours. The point of all this is that it would be fantastic if members of the Astronomy Stack Exchange community could give us some ideas to work with. I've already read through the discovery paper, but obviously, plenty of folks here know more about TRAPPIST-1 and exoplanets in general than I do.
So, what would you like us to put in the post? Discussions of orbital stability? The formation of the planets outside the frost line? A brief overview of ultracool dwarfs? Liquid water? Something else entirely?
We want to use this blog post to promote cross-site interactions, and also to give some publicity to Astronomy Stack Exchange.

Cloned on Space Exploration: http://meta.space.stackexchange.com/q/847/58

Kim Holder has presented a wonderful answer over at SX: http://meta.space.stackexchange.com/a/849/58


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Let's ask more meaty questions! - Part II
Very early on in the life of Astronomy Stack Exchange, during private beta, Jon Ericson expressed concern over the level of questions the site was getting. The problem then was that the site was getting questions that were a) commonly answered elsewhere; b) answered no better than they were answered elsewhere; and c) aren't really high-level questions. Scrolling through the old questions that motivated this post, it's easy to see the trend, even though many of these questions were quite popular, as is common in private beta.
It's almost three years later, and I'm a little concerned that this hasn't really changed. The issue was actually brought to my attention by What are the intended boundaries of this question and answers community?; my answer there shows some of my basic thoughts on the issue:

We've certainly got a number of experts covering a variety of topics - stellar evolution, galactic dynamics, general relativity - but their (valuable) contributions come mainly as answers, not questions. Is it bad that they're no asking questions? Not necessarily. But I still consider it a concern.
We're no longer asking the super-easy, commonplace, already-answered questions that concerned Jon nearly three years ago, but I still don't see a lot of technical questions. Technical questions attract technical answers - which we certainly see - and more experts, which hopefully raises the overall quality of the site.
The site's not dying, or in danger of being shut down (I think!), because of the question level (and I'll be frank, the questions certainly aren't terrible), but it's not at the level where I could look at it from a distance and say, "Hm, this site is really, really healthy and is living up to its potential. Graduation, maybe?"1

So, all that said, I think a push to consciously raise the quality of questions on Astronomy Stack Exchange - not overly artificial, if possible - could really do some good. I haven't been here since the star of private beta; I joined nearly a year later. However, I feel like I haven't really seen a change in the site's evolution. Yes, I admit it, I might be unconsciously comparing us to what a graduated site  - whatever that is - should be like, because I've been with several sites as they've gotten all the way there from birth, but I do think that, even though graduation and success aren't necessarily the same thing, we're farther from either than I'd like.
And yes, I think that increasing the number of technical questions - not eliminating all the beginner ones, for the record - can certainly help.

1 To be clear, I'm not saying that this will make a difference between graduating or getting shut down or something in between - if any of that happens - but I am trying to compare us with sites that are healthier.

It's not anywhere near as bad here as it as at stackoverflow.com. The overall quality of questions there has been decreasing for the last several years as the volume of questions has increased. This site, on the other hand, is still growing. Sure, many (most?) of the questions here are garbage, but the same holds for every SE network site. There are quality non-garbage questions, and the volume of those has been rising as of late at this site.

There is a problem that will perpetually plague this site. The number of professional astronomers, astrophysicist, and astrobiologists is very small compared to the number of professional computer programmers / computer scientists (stackoverflow.com) and sys admins (superuser.com).  That said, we do have some professionals who visit this site regularly. (Shout out to @RobJeffries ! Any question that provokes him to write an answer is almost certainly a quality question.)

Meaty question asked... and thanks DH.

But now the highest ranked unanswered question... :(

@RobJeffries That's absolutely shameful! Bountied; I hope perhaps someone can change that.

Very generous of you.

@RobJeffries As was your bounty on my question. I hope we get some answers.


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Should we revive the Topic of the Week?
Three years ago, Astronomy Stack Exchange had a Topic of the Week, which loosely followed a format Jon Ericson later codified for all of Stack Exchange. I like the idea; I proposed it on Worldbuilding a while ago, and we had a successful run. People seemed to enjoy it there, and looking at the old Astronomy posts, it seems like it was pretty popular here.
I developed misgivings about the whole idea, which I wrote about on HSM. I do think that topic challenges won't necessarily grow the number of people who ask questions, and I do think that it will make people ask forced and perhaps not genuine questions, but given that this worked on Astronomy several years ago, I'm less worried about its potential here.
So, what say you all? Should Astronomy bring back the Topic of the Week?

This is a very interesting idea. It might be handy to generate a little publicity in related SE sites, I don't know if there is a mechanism to do that or not. Perhaps every month, or every Lunar Cycle as @user15217 suggests topics could focus on a discipline or cross-discipline with a different site. Computation hardware, computation/mathematical techniques, physics, space-based observations, mechanical/electrical engineering challenges, the history of astronomy are just off-the-cuff examples that might tie in with other sites.
The Community Bot could be assisted to help bump topic-specific existing questions each Lunar Cycle as well.
I'm happy to help; I've asked in toto about 1,000 stackexchange questions now and I'm just getting warmed up, and I guarantee they are all 100% genuine. I would ask many more here if there were effectively an “Escalate to an Astronomer (in related field)” button at least available to the mods. Raising the number of questions should be balanced with some way to ensure that there are enough people to share in the work of answering them. (Please don't check the number of SE answers I've posted, it's definitely much less than the questions - blush.)
In (at least) some SE sites, some questions are rebroadcast on Twitter if some criterion is met. There may be some way to use this as well, both for questions and to solicit answers if necessary. This is just a thought.
Perhaps an informal discussion in the Observatory might explore some possibilities?
edit: I've just asked What is the extent of the “worldwide campaign” to observe near-earth object 2012 TC4?


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What to do with non-scientific or pseudo-scientific answers?
Specifically, for some reason this question on heliocentricity seems to invite a lot of views outside the realm of the modern science. One had been there for nearly a year, another appeared sometime within the last two days. I've noticed now that both answers have disappeared. At the time, I checked the help center and couldn't find any definitive reason to flag them, and just assumed an incorrect answers is still an answer, and it will naturally fall with downvotes.
Assuming they were deleted by moderators (or really quickly went through close reviews), should we be flagging answers like this? If so, what close reasons should we be presenting?

If you come across questions that attract a lot of noise (pseudoscience, unsubstantiated opinions, beliefs, or just trolling), please notify someone with sufficient site privileges to protect it. I've done that for the one you link to as soon as I saw it, but I agree it could use that sooner than I managed to. So flag for moderator's attention and request protection, or also mention that in our main chat room, assuming anyone is there to see it (a few of us are also active in other [SE] site rooms that could do that). ;)

Oh, also what HDE 226868 says below. I concur. And flag such answers as low quality / not an answer (whichever applies) so they find their way to the Low Quality Review Queue. That might help getting them deleted by community vote faster, or at least down-voted low enough that they don't appear as representing what our site is all about. I would advise against engaging their authors in the comments though, albeit I sometimes simply can't help it, I'll admit that :)

Thanks, this makes sense. I guess it should have occurred to me earlier that such a question might need protection.

To confirm: Both answers were deleted by a mod, but in both cases at least one other user voted for deletion. With or without a mod's unilateral vote, they were going to be deleted at some point.
I'm not going to speak for the mods - I have a feeling at least one will answer - but a custom flag could be used. If the community decides that these answers should be deleted, I think that would be the best option.
But there's a good chance that we should just downvote these things. For example, take this post on Physics. The decision was that non-mainstream - in this case essentially pseudoscience - answers are acceptable because they address the question. Like it or not, they're valid.
Quoting DavidZ,

The reason you can't carry over the reasoning from questions ("we have a non-mainstream close reason, why not delete non-mainstream answers?") is that, first of all, answers are not questions. They fill different roles in the site and there's no reason to expect the same sets of rules to apply to both. Beyond that, our non-mainstream close reason is mostly meant to curtail a specific kind of request: that where someone posts their pet theory that is going to overthrow relativity (or whatever) and challenges us to find something wrong with it. Requests like this are a drain on the attention of professional physicists and grad students (check your spam folder :-p), and we don't want to entertain them on this site. Clearly, this is only an issue for questions, not answers.

I think he has a point, though I'm on the fence about whether or not it's always applicable. In these cases, nobody has a "pet theory" that they want someone to discuss; they're just posting a poor answer.
I also started a mini-discussion in Physics chat (The h Bar) the other day about it. ACuriousMind said something regarding a post I had brought up regarding dark matter:

It's a bit weird because the non-mainstream nonsense there says there is no dark matter, so it would answer the question, if it were right, by showing that the premise of the question "there is dark matter" is flawed.

I have to agree with that logic. These posters are wrong, but we kind of have to let them post them so long as they attempt to address the question. And it can actually help, too, because we can use those posts to comments on misconceptions people might have. If the asker happens to be thinking along the same lines as this poster, we can correct him/her and better explain the concept.
So I leave it. But if the community decides to delete these answers, then a custom flag seems like the best idea at the moment. I'd like to see what the mods say, though.
By the way, Earth Science had a related meta question recently about pseudoscience questions.

For the most part, the pseudo science answers have mostly been short and filled with gibberish (and would probably be deleted via the low quality/not an answer review queue). Otherwise, I'm happy to let the community standard apply - if the community would just give me a standard that I could apply.


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Why was my comment removed?
I posted a comment to this answer. It was about the irrelevance of giving numbers in 18 significant digits, especially if one of the factors for the calculation only has 4 significant digits. I thought this comment was to the point, especially if the site wants to be professional, and IIRC it also had a couple of votes. I just wonder why it was removed (together with a reply to it).

It was requested that the comment thread be removed because it was degenerating into argument without any action being taken, or needing to be taken. If you feel the significant digit issue still needs to be dealt with, you can suggest an edit to the answer or post your own.


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2018: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
To that end, here is how the moderation done here on Astronomy breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  4          8
Users destroyed                                  13          0
Users deleted                                     3          0
Users contacted                                  17          0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue            27        681
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue                1        210
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue          2        351
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue                0        226
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue                 0      1,216
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue               30      1,483
Tags merged                                       2          0
Tag synonyms proposed                             2          1
Tag synonyms created                              2          0
Questions unprotected                             0          2
Questions reopened                               13          7
Questions protected                               4         15
Questions migrated                               17          1
Questions merged                                  2          0
Questions flagged⁴                                3      3,941
Questions closed                                 81        302
Question flags handled⁴                          94      3,850
Posts unlocked                                    0          2
Posts undeleted                                   5         30
Posts locked                                      1        659
Posts deleted⁵                                  219      1,107
Posts bumped                                      0        173
Escalations to the CM team                        2          0
Comments undeleted                                2          0
Comments flagged                                  6        466
Comments deleted⁶                               486        807
Comment flags handled                           311        161
Answers flagged                                   3        659
Answer flags handled                            508        154
All comments on a post moved to chat              2          0

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Astronomy without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁴ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Wishing you all a happy new year...


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"Topic of the week" post was created by User8 but it seems he no longer exists
Let's try to keep the Topic of the week alive, this week no topic was chosen.

Due to lack of traffic and active members in our meta (I think it's only more severe with the new top bar and it used to be easier to switch between main and meta with the previous one, but it's hard to judge in late December when number of visits plummet everywhere on Stack Exchange), we've decided to keep the current TOTW running until the next one is sufficiently voted on. For the better of me, I can't remember who was involved in deciding this or where we noted it, but it was likely in our main chat. I'll add a quote here once I find it tho.
The problem is two-fold, one already mentioned reason is low traffic in our meta, and the other is that the TOTW thread isn't featured any more to display in the Community Bulletin box, which should offset that a bit. Those featured are set to expire automatically (not sure what's the time they're valid for), and moderators need to refresh them. Since there's less activity from moderators too during these festive days (understandable, I'm not judging), it happened. Not a big deal tho, and we could cycle to the next TOTW ourselves too, by deciding which one should be next by votes and then simply editing the TOTW thread to reflect that. Most users active in meta will have ability to do that (reputation privileges), and if they don't, then stopping by in our chat room and mentioning it should remind someone that could.
Now, I've upvoted your own suggestion for milky-way and added it to the list of topics for the week on December 29, 2013 - January 4, 2014. If this seems as a bit one-sided decision, yes, it is. But with the lack of activity, I guess it's the best we've got and keep the TOTW scheme running. I'll also remind Astronomy moderators to feature the meta thread, and I can pin the notice for currently running TOTW in the chat wall myself. TOTW do recycle on Sundays though, so please remind someone either in chat, by adding a custom flag to the thread, or anything like that if we forget. This does happen, and perhaps it wouldn't be wrong if we discussed moving TOTW start dates on some other day of the week too, to avoid such complications in the future. Perhaps on the day when Astronomy.SE Newsletter goes out, which is Wednesdays at around 5 p.m. UTC?


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What are online options for anyone without an astronomy background who wants to contribute to the study of space?
With the advent of the internet, crowdsourcing and communities, many ways to help astronomers worldwide to obtain and analyse data have been proposed; from the comfort of your own home or office, you can make a difference by contributing online. I've seen a couple of interesting ways in which to help that anyone could do. Two examples jump to my mind:

SETI@home:

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.
Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.

Galaxy Zoo:

From Wikipedia Galaxy Zoo is an online astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scientific research. An improved version—Galaxy Zoo 2—went live on 17 February 2009. The third iteration of the project, launched in April 2010, Galaxy Zoo: Hubble, used Hubble Space Telescope survey data. The fourth and current version was launched in summer, 2012, incorporating new images of the Sloan galaxies and images from Hubble's CANDELS survey. Galaxy Zoo is part of the Zooniverse group of citizen science projects.

What other online alternatives do you know of and which one do you think would be a bigger contribution?

@Donald.McLean I've limited my question to online sources as to make it less broad and keep answers already given as valid.

Unfortunately, this question still falls into a category that is most commonly known as "list questions" in that there are, potentially, arbitrarily many answers.

Also,  spacehack offer, in their words, "a directory of ways to participate in space exploration" using data analysis or distributed computing.

Tons of projects to choose from, this is an excellent resource.

Galaxy Zoo is part of Zooniverse, as is www.PlanetHunters.org. In that you search for exoplanets by help classifying stars, binary stars, and so on, and finding transfer patterns, where the exoplanet might pass around the star. I like this one in particular because I talked to the scientists in Kepler team and they were explaining how much valuable and how much they use the data produced by public classification.

It would be interesting if you could share more details about the conversation and how they use the data

They use it in only possible way, to help them classifying stars and finding transfers. For many shape recognition tasks, humans are way more accurate and fast than machines. If you want you can post another question and I can send it across to them, of course no response is guaranteed.


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Should a link to earthscience.SE be added to the custom off-topic close reason?
One of the custom off-topic close reasons on this site currently reads as follows:

Questions about Earth science, unless directly related to phenomena observable on other celestials, Solar system in general of which Earth is a part, or as an origin of observational astronomy where its movement, local/global phenomena might affect observations and measurements, is off-topic. For more information, see the meta discussion.

Now that Earth Science has been in public beta for a little while, I would like to suggest that the close reason be edited to include a link to earthscience.SE. Perhaps something like this (changes in bold, most of which is just copyediting besides the added last sentence):

Questions about Earth science, unless directly related to phenomena observable on other celestial bodies, the Solar System in general of which Earth is a part, or observational astronomy where the Earth's movement or local/global phenomena might affect observations and measurements, are off-topic. For more information, see the meta discussion. You may be able to get help at Earth Science Stack Exchange.

possible duplicate of Custom Off Topic close reasons

Not really a duplicate, but we already have a thread where we suggest custom off-topic close reasons and vote on them. I would suggest simply adding your suggestion there and see how it stacks up with community votes against others. There's a limited number of custom close reasons that moderators can add to the list (IIRC only three).

@TildalWave Thanks for the pointer; note that this is not an additional close reason, but rather an alteration to an existing one, and that the existing one isn't even in that thread to begin with.

It would be a good time to add it then ;)

I'm not sure how I feel about that. It may encourage cross-posting over migration, but on the other hand not everything that we close with that close reason do we want to migrate--yet the OP is certainly free to attempt posting it at Earth Science to see how it is received. I'll let some others weigh in on this.


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Another Tumbleweed after Migration
I asked for migration to Astronomy.SE of this question, for which I already got a Tumbleweed badge on Physics.SE.
Right after migration I got another badge here. Is this a bug?
Further, there was a comment, shown in the timeline, which wasn't migrated. Why's that?

Well, the question was asked  more than a week ago, and had no answers. Migration doesn't change the date. I think this is expected behavior.

Would I get a [badge:popular-question] as well?


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What's on topic on this site?
Now that you've got moderators, you can edit the on-topic page in your help center! Cheers!
Now what do you put there? Post your points in the answers below, and vote for them.

This site is for the observational science of Astronomy: how to gather data, where to look for it, with what equipment, who has done what, how we define / catalogue something, also discussing other astro societies, events, e.t.c.
I'm paraphrasing TildalWave. Feel free to edit this into a better format for the help center.


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Overly restrictive requirements on citing sources?
I recently answered a question and was told by several moderators that I need to add sources. Is this really an appropriate thing to require for a Q&A website? I think that you can assume that if no source is quoted, linked, or cited, that it is either opinion, original research, or wrong. A healthy Q&A website will have lots of good answers and a few bad (even wrong) answers. That's why we have voting, right?
Being told to cite my sources made me never want to answer a question on here again. It drives away people who aren't hardcore researchers, but who may be able to contribute. If that happens, people will stop asking questions that aren't at the level of an academic journal, and before long, the site will be exclusive to people with PhDs in astro-physics. That's fine if that's the goal, but I thought this site would be more than that.

Technically, sources aren't required, otherwise the moderators would have just deleted your answer. This is a question for which the community needs to reach an acceptable balance. On the one hand, we want to encourage participation by folks who aren't professional astronomers. On the other hand, we do want to encourage participation by people who are professional astronomers, and that may require higher standards for both questions and answers. But how much higher?

It may be that for (some) questions you do need a PhD in astrophysics to provide an authoritative answer. Whether it gets upvoted afterwards depends on how well you write that answer. I usually try to gauge the level of answer required from the way the question is posed. Dont always get it right.


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Custom Off Topic close reasons
It would be useful if we could have some custom off topic close reasons.
One of the most useful ones would be:

Close as Product Recommendation

Any others?

@Undo - Edited and answer created.

Questions seeking product or service recommendations are off-topic because they tend to become obsolete quickly. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve.


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Should we add non-physical and/or astrology questions to the off-topic list?
In the last couple of days we had some weird question: (this and this) and a question about astrology.
My gut feeling is that as the number of people using Astronomy will increase, we will get more such questions.
The first two questions are of the kind
“What if ______ ?”
already in the don't ask list.
But there could be some similar nonsense questions (allow me the rant) written in a better way. As well as more astrology questions.
Should we add explicitly that non-physical questions are off topic?

In no way, shape, or form should astrology be on-topic.
This should be added to the FAQ to make it perfectly clear.
However, I think we should make it slightly more generalized in the off-topic list something more along the lines of:
Questions about any field that is normally categorized as "occult" (including but not limited to astrology), or any part or aspect of religious beliefs. Also, the viability of any part or aspect of the occult or religious beliefs as a field of science.
It's a bit long and lawyery sounding, but I think that if we're clear and up front on these topics, we can save ourselves some grief later.

I would suggest to change that to something like "question which require occult/unscientific answers". For instance, a question like "I want to pray towards Jupiter. What is an easy way to estimate the right direction?" is a question that can have reasonable answers.

Try not to be too eager to pile on the rules before there is an actual problem. If you take every instance of site moderation as an occasion to add yet another rule, you're description is going to become very uninviting. Your help center becomes a treatise on all the ways you can go wrong on this site.
You've hosted almost 250 questions without a problem. Those two questions were asked by one user who seemed to have something else going on beyond a common misunderstanding. I don't think this calls for a broad amendment to describing what this site is about.

I see your point. I think that after reading a few comments here I'm satisfied with the decision about astrology, and for the rest lest decide case by case


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What is the difference between astronomy and space stack exchange websites?
I have been going through some questions on astronomy.stackexchange.com and noticed that some questions were merged from space.stackexchange.com and vise versa. My question is simply what is the difference? Would it be a good idea to combine the two websites? If not, why not?

Space exploration is an enterprise, but Astronomy is a study.
As specifically mentioned in the Space Exploration help center:

Space Exploration is primarily about spacecraft, how to send them to space, and their functions there. Specifically, questions on these topics are encouraged.

Space exploration
Satellite design and operation
Systems with potential use in space
Scientific discoveries made by space probes

Questions these topics (and many others) are not on topic here:

The study of exosolar objects, except as they relate to space travel.
Physical sciences, such as geology, astronomy, meteorology, except as they relate to spacecraft and space exploration.

Here on Astronomy we explain in our help center:

Astronomy Stack Exchange is a Question and Answer site about astronomy and astronomy related topics; the study of objects and matter outside the Earth's atmosphere and of their physical and chemical properties
The purpose of this site is to provide expert level answers to questions on:

Setting up, using and maintaining your astronomy related equipment
Astronomical observations, for all celestial objects across the entire spectral range.
Astrophysics and Cosmology
Planetary Science and Celestial mechanics
Data returned by space missions such as probes, rovers and satellites
What type of equipment will allow you to see a certain entity

What questions are off topic here?

Earth science, unless directly related to phenomena observable on other celestials, Solar system in general of which Earth is a constituent part, or as an origin of observational astronomy where its movement, local and global phenomena might affect observations and measurements in any way, is off-topic on Astronomy but can be asked on Physics now or Geoscience once this Stack Exchange site proposal reaches public beta.
Questions about maintenance and general use-age of equipment such as the Curiosity Rover. A question can be about data returned by these pieces of equipment, such as atmospheric composition and planetary composition, but questions about the tools on the rover or how the rover cleans its solar panel are off-topic
Questions that are purely hypothetical, for example a question such as 'Could a black hole destroy the universe' or 'What if our solar system had two suns'
Questions about artificial satellites whose purpose is not directly related to astronomy. You may ask about their orbit, but not their purpose, use-age and safety features
Questions asking for a specific brand or model of telescope, these are very time and opinion specific and are likely to incite debate

It is important that we have these distinctions because these two areas are separate in the career world as well. They certainly have a large degree of overlap, but Space Exploration has a strong engineering emphasis whereas Astronomy has a strong science emphasis.
Space Exploration has a strong enough following to hold itself as a separate area, and Astronomy is growing a similar base.

Thank you for the detailed response but can you also directly state the difference between Space Exploration and Astronomy? I still don't quite get it or maybe I missed it. I always thought that space exploration was a branch of astronomy. I feel like just because it is two separate career bases is also not a good argument but that could be because I'm not old enough to be looking for a career yet. Also, I have noticed that both sites are in beta so wouldn't the production rate of the two sites increase if they were to merge?

@BakedPotato Actually, beta status around here isn't directly related to production rate. Space Exploration, as I mentioned, is largely an engineering enterprise. Astronomers could care less how the James Webb telescope gets to space; they want to use it for their study. Space exploration is an enterprise, but Astronomy is a study. Space Exploration is concerned largely with where humans (or their devices) can go. Astronomy is concerned with the science of the cosmos.

@BakedPotato Wikipedia puts it nicely: "While the study of space is carried out mainly by astronomers with telescopes, the physical exploration of space is conducted both by unmanned robotic probes and human spaceflight."

Thank you for clearing things up for me! I like the part "Space exploration is an enterprise, but Astronomy is a study". You should include that in your actual answer.


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Are questions easily answered by Google or Wikipedia on-topic here?
This question ("What is the Great Attractor?") is the one that prompted me to ask this, but it's a more general question.
If a question like "What is Foo?" can be quickly answered by, for example, reading the Wikipedia article with "Foo" in its title, should it be posted here?
Pro: The question may be interesting in itself, and with the site in beta it's important to build up a pool of good questions.
Con: The point of Stack Exchange in general is to provide high-scoring Google search results. If a Google search can already provide a thorough answer, what's the point of asking here? On Stack Overflow, for example, a question like "What is recursion?" would probably be closed rather quickly.

I'm the guy who asked "What is the Great Attractor?" and I admit that I pretty much knew the general answer before I asked it.  I asked it at least partly because I thought it would help the Astronomy SE become more ubiquitous.  I kind of know how Google works (I used Google ad-words in my business and have done a little work in SEO), and I know that a lot of StackOverflow's traffic comes in via Google searches, so the more hits the Astronomy SE gets on Google (or, for that matter, Bing), the greater will be the knowledge of its existence, its usage will go up, and everyone will benefit.
Keith's "Con" above is actually the point -- we should be trying our best to get Google to point to Astronomy SE in addition to, or even in preference to, other sources that might have an answer.  Including Wikipedia.  Note that if we reference Wikipedia in our answers, this will actually help Wikpedia, not this SE, per se.  But if this site becomes a source of references for Wikipedia articles on astronomy, this will benefit the Astronomy SE.  Note that Google increases the score of sites which are referenced by other sites.  By becoming a source, our rank on Google goes up, which is to be desired.
Keith is right that it is important to build up a pool of good questions.  Good questions include not just the esoteric, but also the basic.  If you search StackOverflow for "What is recursion?" you will find that this basic question has been asked, and has been answered, not closed.  OK, marked as a duplicate, but not closed, and with some good answers and a few programming jokes thrown in.  In my opinion, SO benefits from this question having been asked.  And if you Bing "What is recursion?" this question on SO is #8 in the list of results.
Another case in point is "What is tail-recursion?", which is a very popular question (viewed nearly 100,000 times) with 396 upvotes and has been favorited 179 times.
The point I am trying to make is that we should be making a goal of turning this Stack Exchange into an important resource for people to find out more about astronomy, and one way to do so is to serve all levels, from basic to advanced to esoteric.  If someone Googles "barlow lens" for example, we should want this SE to be high in the search results.  This increases the size of our community, because the more people who come here and ask questions without being shunned because they can find answers somewhere else, the better.

The "What is recursion?" question was closed as a duplicate of "Examples of Recursive functions", which was itself closed as off-topic. Yes, the latter got 16 upvotes, but it was posted in 2008, when the Stack Overflow culture was a bit more lax about such things. (I'm not arguing for or against a position here, just getting the details right.)

@KeithThompson - Details noted!  I hadn't seen that -- didn't follow it up far enough.  The "What is Tail-recursion?" survived, however, and made it to community wiki standard.


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Let's ask more meaty questions!
It's been an exciting first (partial) week.  We've got 105 questions (and counting) with a number of interesting and useful answers.  However, I'm concerned that too many of your questions do not, um, play to the strengths of the Stack Exchange network.  In particular, more than a few questions so far are probably best answered with an article from some other site on the internet (notably Wikipedia).
Here are a sampling of questions (from different askers) that demonstrate the problem:
How do stellar temperatures vary?
What causes a star to become a pulsar?
Why is only one side of the Moon visible from Earth?
What is the naming convention for newly discovered objects?
What is the accepted theory as to why Uranus' axis is tilted so severely?
Does the Sun belong to a constellation?
One of the things we do to evaluate the health of a site is to grab a sample of questions 10 answered questions from the quarter and ask users to review them.  (For an idea of what I mean check out the most recent Academia site eval.)  In particular, we are looking to see if our answers are better than what can be found elsewhere on the internet and if they are easy to find via a search engine.  Since we are in private beta, Google won't find our answers yet.  So I invite you to search for the answers to these questions and consider if the answers we have so far would make you happier than what you find on other sites.
My former colleagues at JPL and NASA are doing some amazing work to educate the public about astronomy.  It would make me very sad (and apologetic) if folks can't find that information because this site beats them at SEO. And I'd be doubly put out if our answers were shallow, uninformative and boring.  Please ask deeper and more-specific questions.  And when you see commonly-asked questions, either write strong answers that improve on easily discovered sources or vote to close (as "too broad", most likely).  When we are ready to make the site public, let's make ourselves presentable.

On a related note, I've closed two questions that are more about astronomy as a career field than astronomy itself:
I'd like to become an astronomer. What experience do I need?
What is the current routine of modern astronomy?
I have mixed feelings about this since there is some merit to having these questions on the site.  It's not unnatural that people interested in scientific research would also be interested the scientists who do it.  If there were just one such question and if the rest of the site was filled with more meaty questions, I probably wouldn't mention it.
The problem with these questions is that they are really the sort of thing you should ask a career counselor or in chat.

Finally: I've got my eye on you, black-hole tag.
Challenge
Ask more interesting questions this week than you did last week!

@Undo: In my experience, people are fascinated with black holes because: 1) they are very strange, 2) they sound a little frightening, and 3) they are ripe for science-fictiony speculation.  Some of the current black hole questions seem to be focused more on #3 than I'm comfortable with.

A lot of concepts explanation without LaTeX would be too much meat for the day. Get us MathJax and we'll give you a bloodbath!

But...but... black-hole is my tag :p On a more serious note: I was thinking of posting something similar. There's another issue I see in this site's growth (it reminds me of Arduino in a way), which I may post about later.

Here's also a concern of mine: For SE sites that have more to do with programming (namely StackOverflow), there is a great deal of traffic involving specific implementations of code. I mean, there are literally dozens of questions involving how to use regular expressions on StackOverflow. Yet, you could simply pick up any book on regular expressions to get the same information.
When it comes to sites like Astronomy.SE or Physics.SE, unless we have researchers involved asking questions at the forefront of our current understanding, these sites rely on non-professionals asking questions that can be found with minimal time spent looking on Wikipedia or googling. At least once the site gets going and more professionals join, these are probably the vast majority of questions that we will get. There are something like 10,000 professional astronomers world-wide. I'm not convinved that that's a large enough population to draw from to get this site off the ground.

We don't need a site full of professional astronomers.  We need a site full of people who are good at answering astronomy questions.  Astronomy is eternally fascinating to millions of people.  Much of the research in astronomy is public, but not easily digestible.  So there's a huge opportunity for people who are able to understand scientific research to answer detailed questions from those who are merely curious.

@JonEricson so if professionals being here is not important, is this astronomy site intended to be rather popular than professional in nature? I think a fair number of professional astronomers should be here for the content of the site to be correct and reliable. Just people asking curious questions and others simply browsing the internet to answer without studying astronomy themself is probably not enough to guarantee good quality. I have already seen some confused answers (about dark matter questions for example) which get upvoted anyway ...

You're aware that the definition of "professional" is "paid to engage in an activity" and not the antonym of "ignorant", right @Dilaton?

I do agree that we need a fair amount of non-professionals for a healthy SE site to persist - and it is true that non-professionals can answer detailed questions very accurately (sometimes they may do it better, since some astronomers are terrible at writing). The only concern of mine, and this may turn out to be premature, that there are more half-cooked, half-researched answers than properly answered ones. However, I do understand that there are upvotes/downvotes, edits, comments, and the like, so again, this may not really turn out to be a problem worth worrying about. Just thinking.

I just don't want this to be a place where professionals come and look around and say, "I'm outta here". We want to attract them, too, since they're the ones who can throw their specialty into the mix.

I would say then, that it's important to focus on questions from folks who are "doing" astronomy, @astromax. Whether that's at a beginner/enthusiast level, or, as you suggest, the cutting edge. Such questions allow for experience and expertise to be brought to bear on a problem rather than simply rewarding Wikipedia quotes.

So in other words, I should focus on asking and answering questions which are at my level of expertise?

As a young 'professional' astrophysicist, I have attempted to answer a selection of questions that can be related to my research or previous experience. Given that there are so few astrophysicists working in each specific research area, it may be hard to find people that can provide much more insight than someone who is generally interested in the area, but not a practicing researcher. Also, given that research publication is moving to a more open model, I think that the lines are blurring between professional journals (e.g., ApJ) and the likes of wikipedia articles (many of which are written my specialists). So, the niche questions that are not answered by general interest sites may be few- or at least hard to identify.
That said, can someone identify for us users, which questions asked so far on Astronomy Beta are best suited to the site?
At least for me, this is not terribly clear.

I rather like What is the predominant element in the dust of the Sombrero Galaxy?.  I also see some promise in questions tagged [tag:amateur-observing] (though I don't actually like the tag: too meta).


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Why was this question migrated to space exploration?
This question: What is a "Space elevator"? was migrated to the space exploration SE.  Whats the line between astronomy and the Space exploration SE site? The name would suggest that all space exploration questions are on topic on this site, but not vice versa. Is space exploration for technology around space travel? What kind of questions are better fit there than here on astronomy?

You can see on the on topic section of the help page for our site what is in scope here. A space elevator is a device (large-scale equipment) which does not directly support astronomical observation or data gathering, so questions about it are off topic. Now, a question about how a space elevator might be used for astronomical data gathering would be on topic, though probably too speculative at this point. A question about how we might observe space elevators around other worlds would also be on topic, though that might also be too speculative.


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External resource questions on Astronomy
This question has been flagged as possibly being off topic with the reason "Request for an external resource - normally considered off topic on other sites."
In the case of this specific question, I am inclined to leave it, more because of the quality of the answer than of the question.
However, in general should they be regarded as on or off topic?

I think resource requests should be treated, for the most part, like list questions. If there is a way to produce a finite, best quality list of resources, then the question is good. If the only problem is that the list might increase over time, it might be worthwhile making a community wiki question. Otherwise, it should be closed.
These types of questions should be careful to cite the resources as fully as possible (title, author, publication data, etc.) so that it is possible to track down the resource (links to amazon pages or other webpages showing the resource are not sufficient because they are subject to link rot). For web-based resources, check the Wayback Machine and make sure they are cataloged before adding to the answer. This way if the pages go down, there is a backup reference.

Rather accademic in spirit communities in the network have generally no problem with allowing study material / reference / data request questions. This is only an issue on sites that are too focused on the SE point of view at the expense of people who want to seriously learn and investigate the topic of the site. IMHO astronomy should rather endorse the more natural and liberal academic / scientific point of view and let people ask for study material / references / data etc if the question is reasonably narrowed down and well-defined.
So these in SE terminology so-called resource or "recommendation" questions should generally be regarded as on topic.

This is also my opinion, I agree.

(*academic)


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Questions Which Are Cosmological in Nature
There have been a number of posts so far discussing the scope of this astronomy SE site. Physics-y questions seem to be okay if the physics is directly related to astronomical/astrophysical objects (Are physicsy questions on-topic here?;How to draw a line between Astrophysics and Physics, if there is any posibility?).
My question pertains to cosmology. Do cosmological questions belong here or not? I would hope yes, but cosmology can sometimes be a bit more mathematical in nature. Additionally, it intersects with other branches of physics (namely particle physics, general relativity, etc..), which may or may not belong in an astronomy SE site. I'd be interested to hear opinions on this.

Yes
If astronomers and astrophysics study such questions (and they do), ask your cosmology questions here.


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Concerns about this site
(Apologies in advance if I seem to wander in this post. I'm having a multitude of thoughts and I'm not quite sure how t organize them)
Ever since I've joined, I've been a bit uneasy about this site. Mainly, I couldn't exactly see what niche it filled.
Firstly, the site was already a strict subset of Physics. Scope-wise:

Which is not a complete disaster, because the audiences may not match. However, audience wise:

From day one, I kept feeling like I was on Space.SE. The audience felt the same, the users were the same, and since both sites were on the beta theme, I couldn't tell them apart. At all. I still get confused as to which site I've seen a particular question on.
This actually partially answers the question about the niche it has to fill. Astro.SE seems to fill the niche of an enthusiast astronomy site pretty well. This was part of the initial motivation for creating the site.
But the site can't just be an enthusiast site. SE sites traditionally are geared towards expert questions, and we need those too.
Which makes me question where this site stands, again. ChrisWhite (an astrophysics grad student and Physics.SE high rep) managed to put some of my uneasiness into words:

i would join if it were just amateur astronomy and such (maybe a place for purchase recommendations like photography.SE)
but I don't condone their "and astrophysics" bit
that's the problem - the fact that the amateurs who wanted it were afraid to ask astrophysics questions here means they don't want the kind of answer i'd give

The site was started with the intention of having a place for astronomy away from Physics.SE. This starts conflicting with the expert portion of the site.
One major issue is that if the site goes public, are we going to have enough expert questions? Physics already has quite a few astronomy/astrophysics experts and most questions asked there get answered beautifully. If someone wants an expert answer, why would they not just ask there? While we can seed the site with expert questions right now, that is not sustainable.
One idea that comes to mind is to merge this (both content wise and scope wise) with Space Exploration, creating a site about Space in general. The communities are already very much alike,  and I don't think that the scope merge will be a big issue. With Space Exploration, this site has a much better chance of survival.
Any thoughts on the matter (in general, not just merging with Space)? What exactly is the purpose of this site?

What I have seen is that in the time that Astronomy was waiting to get reapproved Space Exploration expanded in scope to include a lot of material that folks on Astronomy are interested in asking about. There are still several different questions, but unless they increase in volume I'm afraid they can't sustain the site by themselves.

This seems a lot like the EE vs Arduino issue. I agree with Jon's take on this.

@AsheeshR I agree, that's where a lot of my thoughts on this are coming from. The difference is that there's a lot of duplication with two sites in a different way. Also, Physics is not deriding of basic questions unlike EE, at least on the main site.

Thank you for the Venn diagrams.  They are interesting and on point.  To the extent they mesh with observed reality, they represent a critical flaw in the current makeup of this site.  A site may very well overlap completely in scope with another site.  (Case in point: Ask Ubuntu and Unix & Linux.)  Or a site may share an audience.  (Too many examples to list.)  But if a site overlaps in scope and audience, it's hard to determine how it will sustain itself.
However, the example questions that defined the proposal fail to be a proper subset of  Physics.  I see some overlap with Physics, a little with Space, and a tiny bit with Photography.  The bulk of the questions fill a gap between these topics.  The proposed site seemed to be directed toward an audience that reads Sky & Telescope, Astronomy Magazine, Discover Magazine, and the Science & Astronomy section of Space.com.  Yes, such a site would overlap with several sites in both audience and subject matter.  But it would be a clear niche.
The Astronomy beta was ill-timed since it followed so closely on the heels of Space Exploration's launch.  It should not be a surprise that those sites share so many users.  It also is not a surprise that Physics users have taken an interest in a site that, in the eyes of many, carved out a chunk of that site's topic.  I don't think this site needs to be built for the sorts of experts who are paid to do research.  I think the Sky & Telescope crowd are interested in a technical site, but not necessarily an academic one.

@UV-D: That's how I read the example questions on Area 51.

Actually, all the questions there are on topic for Phy, by design. Physics expanded its scope to Physics&Astronomy so that the old Astro community could move in without any problems. This includes astrophotography (though the astrophotography questions from the site were migrated to [photo.se]). But I see your point here, this makes me less uneasy about this site :)

@Manishearth, Jon So do you mean that if it reshapes to Sky & Telescope, it could be more successful? Because there is audience that interested in those, but not Physics and Space in general.

I once thought about asking some rather theoretical cosmology stuff here (when I committed), but something always held me back and now I see that the scope of the audience is settling down to something like Sky & Telescope for enthusiasts indeed, which would make such questions as I had in mind look blatantly off the mark... I did not careful enough take into account what the scope and targeeded audience of this site will be, which was my bad of course.

@hwlau Not exactly, because that seems to me to be too narrow to be sustainable. Also, with that proposal the venn diagrams above still apply.

@Dilaton Nah, those would have been great. We have some experts in those areas as well (eg astromax, I think), who can answer them.

@Dilaton Hi, you are still around here. The scope seems changed after the definition phrase, if you read those sample questions there, you can find the different. The people participate is different from the original one.

@Manishearth It might still be sustainable. There are many stars out there, there are many backyard technique to share. But the problem is that the people here seems thinking Astronomy, which study far away stars, is the same as Space which study near Earth objects. Therefore the scope overlap is that serious.

I'm just coming across this now, but I would point out that while the example questions are not a strict subset of Physics, they're pretty close. By my count, of the 68 which are not negatively voted, at least 57 would be on topic on [physics.SE], including 37 of 40 with score at least 10. That's a pretty significant overlap.

@DavidZ: I didn't count up the questions (and to be honest, I don't know the scope of Physics very well).  It's more the vibe of the questions as I read them.  Now it could be that the way I read the questions was influenced by the type of site I would like to participate on myself.  But in any case, Astronomy needs to find it's own niche, if not in subject then in audience.  (And thank you for the input.  I'll take another look at the definition phase.)


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Topic of the Week Archive
This is the archive of all Topics of the Week whose end date was more than 30 days ago.

Return to the main Topic of the Week thread

meteor (October 20 - October 26, 2013)

A meteor or "shooting star" is the visible streak of light from a meteoroid or micrometeoroid, heated and glowing from entering the Earth's atmosphere, as it sheds glowing material in its wake. Meteors typically occur in the mesosphere at altitudes between 76 km to 100 km (46–62 miles). The root word meteor comes from the Greek meteōros, meaning "suspended in the air".

from Wikipedia
Meteor may also be used commonly as a shortened form of meteoroid.

A meteoroid is a small rocky or metallic body travelling through space. Meteoroids are significantly smaller than asteroids, and range in size from small grains to 1 meter-wide objects. Most are fragments from comets or asteroids, while others are collision impact debris ejected from bodies such as the Moon or Mars.

from Wikipedia
Example questions:
Have we ever observed a large meteor hit the Moon?
Why did the Chelyabinsk meteor explode?

Posted by:

Upvotes: 2

dwarf-planets (used November 10 - November 16, 2013)

A dwarf planet is a planetary-mass object that is neither a planet nor a satellite. More explicitly, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defines a dwarf planet as a celestial body in direct orbit of the Sun that is massive enough for its shape to be controlled by gravitation, but that unlike a planet has not cleared its orbital region of other objects. The term dwarf planet was adopted in 2006 as part of a three-way categorization of bodies orbiting the Sun, brought about by an increase in discoveries of trans-Neptunian objects that rivaled Pluto in size, and finally precipitated by the discovery of an even more massive object, Eris. This classification states that bodies large enough to have cleared the neighbourhood of their orbit are defined as planets, while those that are not massive enough to be rounded by their own gravity are defined as small Solar System bodies. Dwarf planets come in between.

 from Wikipedia
Example questions:
What physical features determine if a planet is a major, minor or dwarf planet?
How many planets are there in this solar system?

Posted by:

Upvotes: 1

stellar-dynamics (used November 10 - November 16, 2013)

Stellar dynamics is the branch of astrophysics which describes in a statistical way the collective motions of stars subject to their mutual gravity. The essential difference from celestial mechanics is that each star contributes more or less equally to the total gravitational field, whereas in celestial mechanics the pull of a massive body dominates any satellite orbits. Stellar dynamics is usually concerned with the more global, statistical properties of several orbits rather than with the specific data on the positions and velocities of individual orbits. The motion of stars in a galaxy or in a globular cluster are principally determined by the average distribution of the other, distant stars, and little influenced by the nearest stars.

 from Wikipedia
Example question:
Relativistic effects in stellar dynamical systems

Posted by:

Upvotes: 1

planetary-formation (used November 24-30, 2013)

In cosmogony, the nebular hypothesis is the most widely accepted model explaining the formation and evolution of the Solar System. There is evidence that it was first proposed in 1734 by Emanuel Swedenborg. Originally applied only to our own Solar System, this method of planetary system formation is now thought to be at work throughout the universe. The widely accepted modern variant of the nebular hypothesis is Solar Nebular Disk Model (SNDM) or simply Solar Nebular Model.
According to the nebular hypothesis, stars form in massive and dense clouds of molecular hydrogen—giant molecular clouds (GMC). They are gravitationally unstable, and matter coalesces to smaller denser clumps within, which then proceed to collapse and form stars. Star formation is a complex process, which always produces a gaseous protoplanetary disk around the young star. This may give birth to planets in certain circumstances, which are not well known. Thus the formation of planetary systems is thought to be a natural result of star formation. A sun-like star usually takes around 100 million years to form.
The protoplanetary disk is an accretion disk which proceeds to feed the central star. Initially very hot, the disk later cools in what is known as the T tauri star stage; here, formation of small dust grains made of rocks and ices is possible. The grains may eventually coagulate into kilometer-sized planetesimals. If the disk is massive enough the runaway accretions begin, resulting in the rapid—100,000 to 300,000 years—formation of Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos. Near the star, the planetary embryos go through a stage of violent mergers, producing a few terrestrial planets. The last stage takes around 100 million to a billion years.

from Wikipedia
Example questions:

Why haven't asteroid belts turned into new large bodies?
Can protoplanetary disks form main-sequence stars?
Generalised planets?

Posted by:

Upvotes: 1

orionids (used October 20 - October 26, 2013)

The Orionid meteor shower, usually shortened to the Orionids, is the most prolific meteor shower associated with Halley's Comet. The Orionids are so-called because the point they appear to come from, called the radiant, lies in the constellation Orion, but they can be seen over a large area of the sky. Orionids are an annual meteor shower which last approximately one week in late-October. In some years, meteors may occur at rates of 50-70 per hour.

from Wikipedia
I suggest that this tag run next week during the Orionid meteor shower.

Posted by:

Upvotes: 2

cmb (cosmic microwave background radiation) (used October 27 - November 2, 2013)

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the thermal radiation left over from the "Big Bang" of cosmology. In older literature, the CMB is also variously known as cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) or "relic radiation." The CMB is a cosmic background radiation that is fundamental to observational cosmology because it is the oldest light in the universe, dating to the epoch of recombination. With a traditional optical telescope, the space between stars and galaxies (the background) is completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope shows a faint background glow, almost exactly the same in all directions, that is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the radio spectrum. The CMB's serendipitous discovery in 1964 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was the culmination of work initiated in the 1940s, and earned the discoverers the 1978 Nobel Prize.
The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today.

from Wikipedia
Example questions:
What is the mass of hotspots in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation?
Future of CMB observations: How will our knowledge of the early universe change?

Posted by:

Upvotes: 3


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How do we determine what geoscience questions are in scope?
We have basically three classes of geoscience questions here:
Specific Geoscience Questions

Day and night temperature on an earthlike planet with longer rotational period (Note: Says "earth-like" a few times, but the crux of the question is "What would happen if Earth were tidal-locked?")
Earth and ferromagnetism
Why is the Earth's center still hot after millions of years?

General Space Questions Directed at Earth
That is, types of questions that we very frequently ask about space objects that happen to be directed at Earth.

How fast do we travel through space?
Why isn't Earth a perfect sphere?
Why does the Earth have a tilt of ~23°?
How would Earth's climate differ if it's axis were tilted around 90 degrees like Uranus?

Questions about Earth that Involve Other Astronomical Bodies

Why does the Moon stablize Earth's axis?
How often does Earth cross the galaxy regions with higher supernovae activity?
If the moon wasn't receding from Earth, what would be the impact on the weather and tides?
What is the relevance of the Tropics and the Polar Circles? Do they Exist on other planets?
Does the Moon's magnetic field affect Earth's magnetic field?

It is easy to see why  the latter category is deemed on topic, because it involves other astronomical bodies. The middle category is somewhat more difficult. Especially the "perfect sphere" question, which really seems like it should belong in geoscience. The axial tilt question is of a lot more interest to astronomy.
The first category is the one that seems like it should be off topic. And in the case of the last question in it (Why is the Earth's center still hot after millions of years?), we have almost enough close votes from the community to close it (4 out of 5). Yet somehow the other two still managed to pass relatively unchallenged and got a number of upvotes.

So here's the central question:
What stance do we take on geoscience questions?
If they are to be generally excluded from the site, how do we divide those that we include from those we don't?

If you came here from a weird question on Astronomy, an explanation is in order.
We have decided to allow planetary science as a topic on Astronomy.SE, which makes perfect sense. However it brings up the problem that Earth science is a special case of planetary science. Now when one thinks of geoscience they often think of geological questions, questions that frequently apply to other planets. However, geoscience in the broad sense encompasses all Earth science (just a fancy term for any science that studies stuff on Earth). This is a problem because there are a lot of Earth science questions that we probably don't want here. There are milder cases (do we want plate tectonics here?), but there are also stronger cases (cockroaches...seriously?). We need to somehow draw the line between geoscience we allow and geoscience we don't. That way users don't get confused when their question is frowned upon.
I started my campaign of weird questions on Astronomy to draw attention to this issue. So if you are here, please leave a comment or answer of how you think we can draw the line.

Earth science, unless directly related to phenomena observable on other celestials, Solar system in general of which Earth is a constituent part, or as an origin of observational astronomy where its movement, local and global phenomena might affect observations and measurements in any way, is off-topic on Astronomy but can be asked on Earth Science.

For questions about things specific to earth, geology, life sciences etc., many of these "off-topic" kinds of questions are not really off-topic; no matter how off-topic it seems, they usually are just badly worded good questions of the form:

How would this be different on a another planet/system/space, with features XYZ?

The problem is that in many cases these questions are not answerable because they are too speculative at the present. Yes, sometimes rewording is needed and should be done. That might be a good thing to incorporate in our final policy.


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Monthly focus tag
There seems to be an interest in reviving the topic of the week in some form:
Should we revive the Topic of the Week?
My proposal is based on the top upvoted "topic of the month" idea there.

Each month we could highlight a tag on meta with a title like this:

This Month's Focus Tag: the-moon

The focus tag would be the centerpiece for several efforts. We could:

feature clear questions under the tag with one or more excellent answers
encourage asking follow-up questions
engage in editing of posts under the tag
take the opportunity to make sure the tag description is appropriate and update the tag wiki
make blog posts related to the topic, if the blog idea catches on

The answer space of the meta post would be used to coordinate efforts like assembling lists of posts in need of editing or brainstorming ideas to add to the tag wiki or blog. If desired, it could even be used for sandboxing questions related to the focus tag to have the community review before posting in main to prevent poor reception.
What do you think of this idea?

Chat discussion, for anyone interested: https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/47808186#47808186

First focus tag post: https://astronomy.meta.stackexchange.com/q/467/6

Since this idea seems popular, I have some suggestions for the first focus tag:

tidal-forces
photometry
meteorite
dust

These are all high use tags without descriptions that seemed potentially eye-catching to me. I also have some suggestions for highlighted questions:
tidal-forces:
How did Mars come to have a 24 hour 39 minute day?
photometry:
What is the ugriz magnitude system?
meteorite:
How do scientists know that a rock found on Earth came from Mars?
dust:
What is the difference between gas and dust in astronomy?
Please comment with the focus tag you want to see first, and feel free to give your thoughts on the highlighted questions and/or offer alternatives.
If you have other ideas for the focus tag, let us know in another answer.

My personal preference for this would be [tag:dust], which I think has seen a lot of good questions and answers miss out on attention, but these all seem reasonable choices.

They are all great! I also like dust because it has importance in many different subfields and most people will already have some familiarity with it or at least some ideas, so it's good to attract interest.


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Question on daily inequality for tides
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/2096/why-is-there-a-daily-inequality-for-low-tides
I understand the reason for asking this question on Astronomy. The OP likely assumed that the answer to his question had something to do with gravitational influence of astronomical bodies.
That said, the question is about tides on Earth and the answer is Earth science based. Robert Cartaino has correctly pointed out that this should lead to it being off topic.
Because this question is of reasonably good quality and already has a couple of good answers, my inclination is to leave it alone for now then migrate it to Earth Science once it hits beta (an assumption, I know, but I think it is a pretty good one).
What does the community think?

I agree it to be mainly geoscience; Moon and Sun trigger tides, but the physics implied is much more complex, and may trigger a couple of follow-up questions in Earth Science clearly off topic in Astronomy.
Leaving it here (in the meanwhile) is ok for me.


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Winter Bash 2016: Do we want hats?
It's that time of year again!

The year is rapidly coming to a close, which means even though we typically hate it, it’s time to have some fun...with hats!  That’s right - it’s time for Winter Bash 2016!!
Overview
Most of you remember previous years’ events, but here is a quick little reminder. Winter Bash is an annual event that can run on any Stack Exchange site that chooses to participate. Users have fun by earning “hats” for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (very similar to badges). We track everyone’s progress using hats in a leaderboard that looks similar to this:

As always, we’re coming up with new hat designs for this year’s fun!
The Details
The event will run from 19 December 2016 up to and including 08 January 2017. Users will be able to see all the hats they’ve earned on http://winterbash2016.stackexchange.com. That site will also have a landing page, explaining the rules and other details of the event.
Individual users who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see hats, and/or are generally anti-hat will have an “I hate hats” option available. And just like last time, at the end of the event, all hats will go back into storage.
The only visual change to the Stack Exchange sites themselves will be the presence of the hats and the “I hate hats” button in the footer.

So...hats or no hats? We have until Tuesday, 13 December 2016 to decide.

I was going to make some sort of pun, involving the HATNet Project (or HATSouth) or a Planet of Hats. But I think I'll spare everyone the pain and just say
Yes! Bring on the hats!
Also, here's a modified photograph of the Mauna Kea Observatory:

Original image courtesy of Wikipedia user Cropbot under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.


text:
Enabling LaTeX?
I was wondering if it would be possible to enable LaTeX mark-up on the site, as is done on the Math Stack Exchange and numerous other Stack Exchange portals. It would be immensely useful when an answer/question requires some mathematics. How do we go about enabling LaTeX support?

It's been asked already.  Understanding that LaTeX support comes at a cost, could you make your case for it in an answer to that question?  (See the proposal on the Space Exploration site.  A decision probably won't be made until after the private beta.

@JonEricson what do you mean that LaTex/Mathjax comes with a cost? Does the site have to pay money for it? Astronomy belongs to the natural sciences and in order to ask meaningful higher-level technical/theoretical questions (conversely to just popular science questions) it should be installed right from the start. In fact I am very astonished that this is not the case here ...

@Dilaton: The cost is that pages are slower to load since the work must be done on the client side.  Several sites that assumed they would need it from the start (e.g., Philosophy) did not actually need LaTeX support.  Since it's not really possible to turn it off once supported (since it will break posts that have used it), we want to be sure the need is there.  I agree that Astronomy is likely going to need it, but please provide such evidence.

@JonEricson in particular in the (private) beta phase, which is meant to define the kind of questions which are appreciated on the future site, it is of paramount importance that people can already start asking higher-level technical questions involving mathematical equations / formulas too. So can Mathjax be enabled please?

@JonEricson what exactly do you mean by "evidence"? The duplicat question is highly upvoted and the answers saying that LaTex is needed too. I know from Physics, Maths, and MathOverflow that slowing down is not really an issue, at least for people with at least reasonable internet connections. Philosophy, Linguistics, etc are not natural sciences, so they need LaTex or Mathjax not that urgently ... This astronomy site will not be able to attract experts, if advanced questions can not be asked in a reasonable readable way ...

Astronomy is intimately linked with physics, which is described in the language of mathematics. Even order of magnitude answers utilize fractions and products of variables, which are difficult to represent in pure ASCII without confusing the reader. Also, not including LaTeX support is going to make it less likely that professional astronomers/astrophysics will participate, of which 99% use LaTeX in their day-to-day work. I have already decided to avoid answering some of the questions on this site simply because doing so is painful without proper mathematical notation.

@Dilaton: I've posted an answer to the duplicate question.  Please don't forget that this is a brand new site.  It's not Physics.SE's little brother.  The direction of the site depends a great deal on what people ask in the early portion of the beta.  I suspect the site will get pretty technical, but we won't know until we see how things shape up.


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Let's get critical: Jan 2014 Site Self-Evaluation
We all love Astronomy Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.
The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter.
Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.
Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Final Results

Why is the interstellar medium so hot?

Net Score: 7 (Excellent: 7, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 0)

Does the radio signal decay when it travels through the intergalactic space?

Net Score: 6 (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 0)

How does one determine the effective temperature of a star from its spectrum?

Net Score: 5 (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 1)

Colossus telescope, trying to outsmart aliens?

Net Score: 4 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 0)

How well can we in principle determine $T_{\textrm{eff}}$ of a star?

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 2)

How can I measure the mass of eclipsing binary stars?

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 7, Needs Improvement: 0)

Can moon set after being up when due north? (pseudo circumpolarity)

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 6, Needs Improvement: 2)

Stars at near break-up rotation rates

Net Score: -1 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 6, Needs Improvement: 2)

Solar maximum and minimum

Net Score: -2 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 4)

Has life been discovered outside of Earth?

Net Score: -6 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 7)

Here are my quick thoughts on the question in reverse-rated order:

Has life been discovered outside of Earth?
This is a question of broad interest with two answers.  The top-voted one is accurate, but too terse.  The second largely quotes Wikipedia with a bit of speculative commentary thrown in.  This could well become a greatest hit, but it really doesn't add much to human knowledge beyond what the rest of the internet provides.
Solar maximum and minimum
Super basic question about solar weather; Wikipedia-style answer.  Ho hum.
Stars at near break-up rotation rates
Very interesting question; expert answer.  So far so good.  The answer needs a friendly edit to help it be well-formatted and a little less chatty.  If someone else had taking the hints to read the paper or done some more digging, there might be a more definitive answer.  There's potential here, but it's untapped.
Can moon set after being up when due north? (pseudo circumpolarity)
A much better question with two solid answers.  This is what I think of when I contemplate an Astronomy Q&A site.  Additionally, it turns up as a top Google result (or number two) for the terms I used to search for the answer.  I could see some niggles with the question, but overall, this is an Excellent question.
How can I measure the mass of eclipsing binary stars?
Probably an overly-broad question.  But the answer seems solid though it doesn't mention the binary star wrinkle, which makes me wonder if it answers a slightly different question.
How well can we in principle determine $T_{\textrm{eff}}$ of a star?
Clearly an interesting question with a knowledgeable answerer.  But it sure seems like the comments should be rolled into the text of the answer somehow.  Also, the asker seems to be left unsatisfied.
Colossus telescope, trying to outsmart aliens?
Just barely makes the first page of results when Googling "colossus telescope".  Add "hide" and its a top result.  Other results don't seem to answer the question, so this is another Excellent in my book.
How does one determine the effective temperature of a star from its spectrum?
A basic question, but a really good answer.  The search space is too crowded for the question to show up on the first page of a search, however. All in all: Satisfactory.
Does the radio signal decay when it travels through the intergalactic space?
Another basic question/good answer situation.  This time, this site makes the first page of Google.  I'd say the three Wikipedia results are likely better places to read up on this, but the Yahoo Answers and forums are worse.  If the question were a bit more specific, I'd say it's Excellent.  As is, Satisfactory.
Why is the interstellar medium so hot?
Good question + good answer + lots of other search results = Satisfactory.

Overall, there's a lot to like about this site.  But it's still in the stage where too many questions are easy and too many answers are heavily cribbed from Wikipedia.  We've made it out of private beta, but the call remains:

Let's ask more meaty questions!

My two cents: we may have a lot of improvement to be done to make our Q&A better, but lately we have had a lot more visitors and a lot more posts with a solid curiosity for diverse and interesting topics. I think the site is doing well and will continue to do better; especially if we strive to improve where we can.

It seemed to me that questions that appeared in this evaluation where mostly very good as were their answers. I know that not all of them are, I wonder if they were chosen randomly.

I found very few to be above satisfactory, though. There is definitely a lot of improvement to be done.

They are chosen randomly from recent, open questions with at least one answer.