| THE
ING NEWSLETTER |
No.
5, October 2001 |
Other
available formats:
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WHT Scientific
Impact
Chris Benn
(ING)
In
the March 2001 ING Newsletter, we
reported a citations-based analysis of the scientific impact of telescopes
worldwide for 1995–8. Amongst 4-m optical telescopes, WHT ranked second
only to CFHT in impact.
Georges Meylan of STScI
has now carried out a similar analysis (unpublished) of astronomy papers
which appeared in 1999. He finds the top 10 telescopes that year to be,
in decreasing order of citation impact, HST, JCMT/SCUBA, ROSAT, CGRO, Keck,
BeppoSAX, SOHO, CTIO 4-m, WHT and RXTE, i.e. the WHT remains one of the
two most-cited 4-m telescopes. The WHT citation fraction for 1999 is approximately
double that for 1995–8, and both the most-cited and second-most-cited papers
of 1999 were based in part on WHT data. The first of these papers, by Perlmutter
et al. (1999,
ApJ, 517, 565) reported measurement of cosmological parameters
from observations of Type Ia supernovae. The second, by Steidel et al.
(1999,
ApJ, 519, 1) reported a survey for Lyman-break galaxies
at redshift > 4. Both teams used imaging cameras at the WHT.
Email
contact: Chris Benn (crb@ing.iac.es)
© Isaac Newton
Group of Telescopes, La Palma, 2001.