The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review - 30th Anniversary Issue Published
The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review celebrates its 30th year in 2019
With the online publication of our last article on 4 November 2019, and now available in print, we have completed the 30th anniversary issue of The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review.
Martin C.E. Huber, Founding Editor, summarises its content and is full of praise:
It is a tome with contributions that cover four timely areas of astronomy and astrophysics that
- seek to create order in astronomical populations ('De re metallica' and 'What is a globular cluster?'),
- explore and summarise distributions of still rather mysterious phenomena ('Distribution of dark matter in galaxies' and 'Fast radio bursts'),
- describe efforts to investigate fundamental physics phenomena by use of astronomy ('Nanohertz gravitational waves' and 'Pulsating white dwarfs'), and
- also address physics questions relevant to astrophysics in general, yet closely connected to solar system phenomena ('Small Solar System Bodies as granular media' and 'Solar wind charge exchange: an astrophysical nuisance').
You have succeeded again in stimulating a set of accomplished authors to review a creative selection of topics in The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review.
A&ARv thus remains the lively and original contribution to the entire field that we all were and are striving for!
In 2019, deeply saddened but also grateful, we remember the first Editor-in-Chief of The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review, Lodewijk Woltjer, who passed away on 25 August at the age of 89. In his Editorial for the first issue in 1989, he had described this journal's motivation, which we are still following 30 years later:
Reviews play an important role in scientific research. Most scientists looking for information in some area will begin by consulting a review and from there possibly make their way into the original literature. A few years after their appearance, most research papers will be looked at by only a few experts, but the essence of these papers will survive much longer through the reviews. It is therefore important that reviews present a reasonably complete and balanced critical view of the relevant worldwide literature. Only in this way can it be avoided that many results are "rediscovered," erroneously attributed or simply forgotten. The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review will provide reviews in this spirit.