At the recent conference on the Star Formation Rate that I attended, one of the opening talks introduced a tongue-in-cheek concept that quickly became a theme for the week. The principle is this: the state of the science today is such that our modern observatories are allowing us to see detail in objects and phenomena that never before have been seen – so much so that we can do science by just looking at pictures. This, we call JPEG science. Further, the drastic improvement in computer technology has allowed for more detailed simulations than have ever been conducted before – so much so that we can do science by just looking at the videos. This, we call MPEG science.

Needless to say, this became a quick meme for every further talk to refer to. I’ll admit that I used this meme in my own talk. In my defense, it was to illustrate the problems with telling stories simply from the picture without any further detailed analysis. In the case I had illustrated, I presented an image of one of my candidate massive star forming regions, and it showed a number of bright spots around the bubble. In fact, they were so bright that everything else paled in comparison. I then posed the question: where was the majority of the light in the image coming from? Naively, one would argue from those points – but the reality was that the majority of the light was coming from the diffuse stuff – even though it looked dimmer. That’s because the area of the diffuse light on the image was much larger than those individual points. For the region in question, this told a much different story than what one would have otherwise assumed. Without that additional step of analysis, the story and the magic of this region would have never been discovered.

What this comes down to  is that JPEG science will tell us the obvious stories, but to appreciate the true mystery of many parts of our universe, we need to put our sleuth caps on and get to real story.

Cue the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego theme music.

Peace,

Mubdi