Keith’s note: NASA just posted this press release “Hubble Unexpectedly Finds Double Quasar in Distant Universe“ which says “The results will be published in the April 5 journal Nature.” and points to this article behind a paywall which you can read/rent for $39.95 – unless you have already paid for access to this taxpayer-funded research (funded by NASA, NSF, NRAO, STSCI etc.) So if you want to see your tax dollars at work – and you do not subscribe to $200/year journals – then this PAO summary is all you get. Yet you can find the preprint of that paper online here – for free: “A close quasar pair in a disk–disk galaxy merger at z = 2.17“ and it is accessible anywhere on Earth – even on the ISS. It has been online since 22 September 2022. I have repeatedly told NASA SMD PAO (just a few weeks ago in fact) where and how to find these preprints – many of which come out the night before or the evening after a formal release. Some preprints are online and approved for publication well before then. The entire NASA-funded research community knows this since they are the ones who submit them to the preprint servers and want their research to be seen ASAP. But NASA Public Affairs seems to have a chronic lazy streak running through it wherein the least amount of effort expended is often more than enough to keep the taxpayers happy. (See my 22 March 2023 post “NASA PAO Does The Bare Minimum (Again) To Announce Another Discovery“) Update: Wednesday evening someone from PAO got around to checking to see if the link went to an open access article and then fixed it so that it does. Why they do not do this before publishing things – thus making people think that they have to pay – is baffling.
Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing