Today’s post marks the 500th highlight published on AAS Nova since our launch in August 2015. To celebrate, we’re taking a moment today to look back at what we’ve published during this time.
What Does AAS Nova Cover?
Breakdown of AAS Nova Highlights by topic, including the seven journal corridors and two AAS-related topics. Click for a closer look.
Journal articles featured in AAS Nova Highlights are selected by the lead and scientific editors of the AAS journals in collaboration with the AAS Nova editor, with the goal of identifying research that is of particular importance or of potential interest to a broad community.
Highlighted articles are selected from across all five AAS journals —The Astronomical Journal (AJ), The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), The Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL), The Astrophysical Journal Supplements (ApJS), and Research Notes of the AAS (RNAAS) — and they span all seven journal corridors.
Observation-based AAS Nova Highlights are twice as common as theory-based Highlights.
The first 500 Highlights published on AAS Nova since launch have been distributed across corridor topics; the four most commonly featured corridors are Planets and Solar System, Stars and Stellar, Galaxies and Cosmology, and High Energy.
The breakdown between theory-based and observation-based articles highlighted on AAS Nova is roughly two-thirds observation, one-third theory.
Who Reads What?
AAS Nova readers come from nearly everywhere in the world, representing over 200 countries and territories. Roughly half of our readers are located in the United States.
AAS Nova readers come from over 200 different countries. [Google Analytics]
Do readers go on to explore the original scientific papers that the Highlights summarize? We can’t determine that with certainty, but we have found that articles that have been featured on AAS Nova are, on average, downloaded more than four times more often than typical journal articles.
What Have You Missed?
Wondering what you’ve missed since we first launched? Here’s a list of the ten most popular Highlights published on AAS Nova in the last 500 posts.
- An Update on Planet Nine
- An Explanation for Saturn’s Hexagon
- LIGO Discovers the Merger of Two Black Holes
- Update On the Puzzling Boyajian’s Star
- A Ninth Planet in Our Solar System?
- What Do You Get When Two Neutron Stars Merge?
- Featured Image: The Q Continuum Simulation
- How Normal is Our Solar System?
- Another Possibility for Boyajian’s Star
- Explaining the Birth of the Martian Moons
We’ve very much enjoyed covering the amazing work AAS journal authors are producing, and we look forward to seeing the exciting ideas and discoveries that we get to feature on AAS Nova in the coming years!