Accepted for Publication!

I just had my 4-page ApJ letter accepted. Woo hoo!! In the sciences, the peer-review process can be helpful, but it can also be a nightmare. I had 4 revisions, mostly benign, to this short letter. I've heard of some people having papers rejected only because the paper disagreed with or disproved something the referee was working on - silence your competition right?

I felt pretty good about my review - we are saying that the current (and only) explanation for my data doesn't fit for at least a few of the targets. We then proposed something pretty new - optical pumping. The referee did require that our discussion go into a bit of detail about this, but he/she was pretty open-minded about the whole thing. It could have been a lot more painful than it was. There were some substantial improvements too just from having to argue coherently against somebody from the other camp. Good stuff.... Since there's really only a handful of people who do this type of work, one group really, I'm sure I'd know the person if they identified themselves. I'm also sure that there will be a letter or paper in the coming months from that other group that argues that our model is crap. Maybe it is. Only more long, painful nights (like tonight) at the telescope can say.....