April Fools on astro-ph

Ah, April Fools a day of great hilarity and pranks. In the world of astronomy it is now different. Take for instance this press release by Herschel:

http://herschel.cf.ac.uk/news/herschel-be-refilled-helium

However, some of the best and most subtle hoaxes can be found on arXiv, the pre-print server for most physical sciences. Every year there are several papers that appear on this day which are either clearly fake or are so well crafted that they appear real unless you read between the lines. All in good fun of course. Actually some of them end up getting cited in actual papers later on, usually as a joke by the authors doing the citing.

In order to save you from gleaning through the 40 odd papers that appeared today on astro-ph (the subsection of arXiv for Astronomy) I have taken time out of my busy day (actually I go through the articles every day anyways) to highlight the fake articles for this year. I will note that there might be some that show up late on next Monday, I will post those if I see them.

Our first article is titled "Non-standard morphological relic patterns in the cosmic microwave background" by Zuntz et.al (2011). This article searches the CMB for non-circular patterns in order to establish some very important information about the cosmos. The article can be found here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.6262

Next we have "Photometry of a photometer" by Pal (2011). This article does photometry on the Herschel Space Observatory. This article is exceedingly important as it confirms the location and magnitude of the observatory. The article can be found here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.6227

Third on our list is an ingenious paper titled "The Observed Inclination Problem: Solved at Last?" by Arzi (2011). This paper proposes a new system for investigating the 3-d nature of astronomical objects. The new system is so simple it is stupid, we could have saved billions by just following this suggestion. The paper is below:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.6167

Next is a paper titled "Searching for comets on the World Wide Web: The orbit of 17P/Holmes from the behavior of photographers" by Lang et.al. (2011). They use photos found via Yahoo Search (I'm surprised they didn't use Google :) ) of "Comet Holmes" to reconstruct the orbit of the comet. Note, they don't actually use the position of the comet in the photos but rather the direction that the camera is pointing.

In all honesty I'm not sure that this one is fake. I could actually see this being possible. I actually think they did the analysis, which is flat out ridiculous but possible. It's a very interesting and hilarious read regardless if it is fake or not. If this one is fake it definitely is convincingly real. The article is below:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.6038

Finally a brilliant piece about our place in the universe entitled, "On the Anthropic Principle in the Multiverse: Addressing Provability and Tautology" by Watson (2011). This paper is simply amazing. I actually think this one is the best one of them all. The paper can be found here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.6044

Anyways, that is my round up of the fake papers on astro-ph today. A very good crop this year. I look forward to the ones generated for next year.