Questions and Answers

At KIPAC we love good questions. This repo hosts the questions that the public ask us about astrophysics and cosmology, and our attempts to answer them. The results are posted to the KIPAC webpage, on the "Questions and Answers" page, and also to the KIPAC blog (where we have a bit more space to explain ourselves).

If you have a question you would like the scientists at KIPAC to answer, please see the How to ask a question section below.

If you are a KIPAC scientist helping out with this project, please see the guidelines below in the How each question is answered section.

How to ask a question

You can ask your question either privately (so only we see it), or publically (so that anyone can see it). Private questions can be asked using the "Ask an Astrophysicist" form on the KIPAC website. Public questions can be asked by writing them into issues to this repository. Thanks!

How each question is answered

Having read your questions, we first decide whether our answer will be of interest to the wider public. It often is! In this case, we may respond in detail, by writing a new, short, blog post, and pointing you to it. If we don't think our answer would be of general interest, we'll try to write a brief reply just to you.

Starting a new "answers" blog post

1. Private questions will be redacted and posted to the issues of this repo with the question label, and assigned to one of the KIPAC outreach team. Public questions will be assigned to one of the KIPAC outreach team, and labeled as a question. The answerer will then re-state the question if necessary.

2. The assigned answerer will then start a new branch named after the question issue (eg question/4/dark-energy), make a new html file in the content folder, with suitably-informative filename (eg. 2016-10-24_Marshall_What-is-dark-energy.html), and start making some notes in it.

3. To answer the question, the answerer will probably need to ask around at KIPAC a bit. They can do this by innocently asking the question of their colleagues by email or otherwise, and then processing the responses into the draft answer.

4. When the answerer is happy with their draft, they will submit a pull request asking the rest of the outreach team to review it. When it is approved, the branch will be merged and the html will appear in the master branch, ready for publication on the blog. Before merging, the Answers front page (index.html) will also need to be updated, to contain a very brief summary of the answer.

Publishing the post

5. One of the website admins will be alerted to the new answer post, and will post it to the blog in the usual way.

6. The Answers frontpage on the website will also be updated, by copying and pasting from the index.html page in this repository, and a "Read more..." link added, to the new blog post.

Comments, copyright, blame etc

The content in this repository is Copyright 2016 KIPAC, but distributed under the MIT license. That means that it is yours to copy and redistribute however you like, just don't blame us if it turns out to be inaccurate. We all need to test our own assumptions! When re-using any of our words, you'll find that providing a citation link back to the KIPAC blog post where they first appeared will make most sense to your audience. If you have comments or questions about this project, or about anything else in the Universe, feel free to write us an issue.