Ceres Geology Options

[Hungry4info]

Describing what are obviously craters as "small conical hills" ... maybe this paper is a better fit for viXra.org instead.

[DFortes]

Is this a joke?

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1712/1712.01320.pdf

I get that its a preprint archive and all that, but....sheesh

P

This is great - perhaps one of the most endearingly mis-guided and unintentionally hilarious things I've seen in a while.
It actually has the line, "Those beauties are really in the eyes of a beholder." on page 4. Figure 39 nearly made me spit coffee over my keyboard.

But if you think that garbage only appears in arXiv, try this paper of dubious statistical quality, which I have to assume was peer reviewed by an actual human being...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-13355-7

[fredk]

Is this a joke?

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1712/1712.01320.pdf

I get that its a preprint archive and all that, but....sheesh

I don't follow the earth and planetary subject area, but the main physics/astro/cosmo areas are extremely well controlled and a paper like this would not get through.

This author hasn't appeared on the arxiv before so would've needed endorsement, which I think is more or less automatic if you have an email address from a known institution. His email address is from the Nauchno-Issledovatel'skiy Fiziko-Khimicheskiy Institut Im. L. Ya. Karpova so that may have let him in easily. But that's a chemistry institute so it's unclear if he has any planetary science training.

The postings are also supposed to be moderated and he's clearly slipped through that net.

[Gladstoner]

Well that was painful.

[angel1801]

I very rarely post anything here apart from me giving valuable money to keep this wonderful site alive and running.

Even former editors of peer reviewed journals have said that up to 40% of all stuff that appears in peer reviewed journals are either of very poor poor quality or even worse a lot of the medical science stuff that appears cannot be re-produced by future research or was constructed is such a way to make the re-production of prior results all but impossible.

[fredk]

The postings are also supposed to be moderated and he's clearly slipped through that net.

I pointed this out and they agreed it was missed by the area moderators. The preprint has been bumped down from astro-ph.EP to the scrapheap - physics.gen-ph.

[atomoid]

hilariously painful indeed! gave up trying to find a timestamp of April 1st, but seems like too much effort went into it to just be a joke..
had the same reaction to figure 39, it perfectly sums up the paper in its own succinct meme...

[Explorer1]

Newly published results showing quite a bit of activity on Ceres as it nears perihelion (next month). More ice in shadowed areas, and detection of calcium carbonate on Ahuna Mons: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7081

[nprev]

Have to wonder if this is partially endogenic, though I can't think of a mechanism unless Ceres is somehow unusually rich in core radioactives. However, since these phenomena appear to coincide with perihelion, a more pertinent question is why Ceres looks so much like a rather ordinary rocky small body dominated by cratering given how fast-acting some of these processes may be.

Volatile deposits may be isolated and widely dispersed, the regolith may vary substantially in thickness, the thermal properties of surface and near-surface materials may vary, all or none of the above. A great many possibilities and questions spring to mind; be fun to see how the pros weigh in.

[JRehling]

On Ahuna Mons, I wonder how intricate the dynamics of downslope mass movement might be. It seems to have been most recently "groomed" by downslope movement, which could mean one single 360° event or a few, or a more or less ongoing process. Perhaps impacts/quakes trigger new flows. And then what is exposed to the surface could be overturned depending on the structural mechanics, and what we see in vis/IR spectroscopy may be a superficial covering that isn't representative of the rest of the structure. This wouldn't require active endogenous geology, if impacts are triggering avalanches, though it doesn't exclude active geology, either.