My most recent article just got published in Astronomical Notes / Astronomische Nachrichten. It is titled “Considerations on how to investigate planes of satellite galaxies” and discusses a number of essential aspects one should keep in mind when studying planes of satellite galaxies such as the Vast Polar Structure (VPOS) around the Milky Way, and when comparing them to cosmological simulations. It was in part inspired by some recent publications that allege that these satellite structures are not a problem for LCDM cosmology. In the paper, we show that these studies are seriously flawed, since they do not consider observational biases, neglect to make any statistical tests or determine significances of their statements, and ignore observational uncertainties.
It is pretty nice to see a paper of mine published in the world’s longest-running astronomy journal, founded on 1821. Even better, the paper was labelled an “Editor’s Choice”, and they even used one of my plots as the cover image of the issue (see left)!