To students: Publish your essays and become world famous!

Perhaps the title sounds unrealistic, but it nonetheless describes the experiences of student Rasmus Bjørk over the course of approximately one month during the beginning of 2007. Rasmus was finishing his Master's Thesis on "Planet formation by disk instability collapse” in the Computational Astrophysics research group at the Niels Bohr Institute, and was preparing for his final thesis colloquim on January 31st 2007 at the University of Copenhagen.

However, back in 2005 Rasmus was following the course ”Planetary physics 2”, for which he wrote an essay on ”Fermi's paradox” and performed a series of computer simulations. The italian physicist and Nobel laurate Enrico Fermi, had in 1950 posed the following question: If the Universe is filled with life then why have we earthlings never met an extraterrestrial alien? A possible answer could of course be that the Universe is not filled with life, but in short Rasmus' work showed that even the most advanced aliens simply could not have had time to explore our galaxy, the Milky Way, yet.

The scientists in Rasmus' group encouraged him to submit a manuscript to the international Journal of Astrobiology, where it was subsequently accepted for publication on December 28 2006. As it has almost become tradition in astronomy, Rasmus also uploaded his paper as a preprint to the online archive ArXiv.org, where scientists and everyone else can freely read and download the roughly 400,000 research papers that have been submitted to the archive: Januar 7th 2007 Rasmus' preprint could be downloaded from ArXiv, and then things began to accelerate!

”When it was accepted I put the paper on astro-ph [the astronomy part of ArXiv.org, Ed.], which is a so called preprint server, and then all hell broke loose", Rasmus' told the communication department at the Niels Bohr Institutet: ”I was contacted by New Scientist and The Guardian. Shortly thereafter BBC- Radio Five called me and asked whether I would participate in a live interview, and subsequently I have been contacted by all kinds of journalists”.

The news about Rasmus’ paper was featured in both ”The Guardian” and on the website Slashdot.org on Januar 18th. He was interviewed by BBC twice on Januray 19th and there were news features on the paper in both ”New Scientist” and danish newspaper ”Berlingske Tidende” on January 20th, and in the institute newspaper "NBI Avisen" on the 26th  – same day that it was mentioned in the engineering newspaper "Ingeniøren" – and the paper was not even officially out yet! Actually it was not yet even listed under ”forthcomming” on the Journal of Astrobiology's website, but was eventhough mentioned on national Danish television and radio (radio news and the evening show on TV "Aftenshowet", where Rasmus was interviewed in the studio).

So what can one learn from this? Publish your excellent essay, and perferably in an online, open archive!

Further reading:
Bjørk, R. (2007) "Exploring the Galaxy using space probes", Int. J. Astrobio. 6 (2), p. 89-93: Preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0701238v2