{"id":66304,"date":"2025-08-13T10:42:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T10:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/66304\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T10:42:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T10:42:09","slug":"high-school-student-who-volunteered-at-nasa-sponsored-lab-gets-retraction-retraction-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/66304\/","title":{"rendered":"High school student who volunteered at NASA-sponsored lab gets retraction\u00a0 \u2013 Retraction Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An astronomical society journal has issued its first retraction in its 10-year history \u2014 for work done by a NASA researcher and a high school student. The duo set out to confirm an astrophysics law using calculations that assumed the law was true.<\/p>\n

The journal, Research Notes of the AAS, is published by the American Astronomical Society<\/a>. It is not peer-reviewed, nor is it indexed in Clarivate\u2019s Web of Science. The retraction has prompted the journal to revise its policies on reviewing work before publication.<\/p>\n

One of the two authors on the retracted 2024 article<\/a> is Jadon Lam, who at the time was a student at Pleasant Grove High School in Elk Grove, California. Lam is now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena studying astrophysics, according to his LinkedIn profile<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time we\u2019ve come across a young researcher who lost a paper. In 2012, we covered a case<\/a> of a high school student who initiated the retraction of his own work after realizing he made a mistake, a move that didn\u2019t end up hurting his future career<\/a> in science.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to the Caltech admissions website<\/a>, research papers are considered supplementary but can be included in applications.<\/p>\n

Corresponding author Jonathan Jiang<\/a>, a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA-sponsored lab at Caltech where the collaboration took place, confirmed Lam is currently enrolled at Caltech but told Retraction Watch Lam\u2019s admission to the university \u201cwas based solely on his academic record and overall merits.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jiang told us Lam was a \u201cvolunteer researcher driven by his curiosity in physics and astronomy\u201d and called the article a \u201cschool project.\u201d Lam did not respond to our request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to the October retraction notice<\/a>, \u201cthe values used for the semimajor axis had, in fact, been calculated rather than being independently measured, implicitly assuming Kepler\u2019s third law,\u201d according to the notice. Kepler\u2019s Third Law<\/a> describes planetary orbit patterns around the sun, and in this case was applied to planets orbiting other stars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chris Lintott, the editor of RNAAS and astrophysicist at the University of Oxford in England, told us the journal was alerted to issues with the project after it went online, when readers started raising concerns on social media.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Peter Plavchan<\/a>, associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, posted on X<\/a> in September. When we asked Lintott if this was the thread which alerted the journal, he told us he was \u201cpretty sure\u201d he encountered the critiques on Bluesky.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Note compares two properties of planets \u2014 the semi-major axis and period \u2014 for a sample drawn from NASA\u2019s Exoplanet Archive, which is a repository of data from many disparate sources,\u201d Lintott told us. \u201cRather than including independent observations, the Exoplanet Archive calculates the semi-major axis for many planets from the observed period, and so what the authors had assumed was data were actually these calculated values.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lintott clarified the journal publishes \u201cworks-in-progress, negative results, short observing reports or communications which may not make a full paper, and for student projects.\u201d\u00a0 He said he moderates the contributions, \u201cassisted where necessary by the rest of the AAS Journals editorial board,\u201d\u00a0 and the journal has \u201cno filter for how notable or otherwise a result is.\u201d The retraction was the first for the journal, which has published over 2,000 \u201cnotes,\u201d Lintott said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He also told us the journal \u201caltered our procedure for checking archival data sources\u201d after the retraction.<\/p>\n

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a\u00a0tax-deductible contribution to support our work<\/a>, follow us\u00a0on X<\/a> or Bluesky<\/a>, like us\u00a0on Facebook<\/a>, follow us on LinkedIn<\/a>, add us to your\u00a0RSS reader<\/a>, or subscribe to our\u00a0daily digest<\/a>. If you find a retraction that\u2019s\u00a0not in our database<\/a>, you can\u00a0let us know here<\/a>. For comments or feedback, email us at\u00a0[email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tProcessing\u2026\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tSuccess! You’re on the list.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tWhoops! There was an error and we couldn’t process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated\n<\/p>\n

\t