Oops!!! Even astronomers can make mistakes. No matter how many times you proof read a paper, an error can creap by. Sometimes, if you are lucky, the editor or the referee will catch it and tell you about it before the paper is typeset and published for all the world, and posterity, to see. Often, the paper gets into press, and someone in the community calls you just to let you know you goofed somewhere. You are then obligated to issue a note to the editor which gets published in the next journal issue that identifies the error, corrects it, and tells the reader what impact the error had on the conclusions of your fine work. It's embarrasing, and most astronomers spend a lot of time checking and double checking tables, formulae and references to avoid the embarrasment of having to publically confess to an Erratum. Don't forget, when you publish a paper, you are playing to an audience of all the living astronomers today, as well as astronomers 40 or 100 years down the line. Also, it is important to convince your collegues that you produce accurate scientific results. Entire careers may hinge on your getting a single number as accurate as you can, and if people percieve that you make dumb mistakes, your reputation can be adversly affected.
A quick glance at the literature shows that most of the errors are simply accidental typsetting errors, which have no impact at all on the scientific conclusions. Other errors, however, require a bit of revision on the part of the author.
(ApJ vol 217. p. 1016) "The errors of the two period-radius relations were incorrectly computed... The statistical significance of the difference between these ( new vs old) slopes is only marginal, and the strength of the argument based on the difference of the slopes is diminished"
(ApJ vol. 209, p. 961) "Because of a computational error...the periods before and after explosion in Table 3 and 4 were effectively computed using only the companion mass rather than the total mass in Kepler's law. The correct value for periods Ti and Tf may be obtained by multiplying each period by the factor 0.77 in Table 3, and 0.89 in Table 4. All other entries in these tables are believed to be correct."
(ApJ vol. 204, p. 311) "Due to a typographical error, the parameter A5 appearing in Table 1 has a minus sign in front of its numerical value. This minus sign should be replaced by a plus sign. The rest of the paper remains unchanged."
(ApJ. vol.256, p. 798) "The authors regret to announce that they must attract ( they actually mean retract! ) their claim of the discovery of a high-velocity emission-line nebulosity associated with the Seyfery galaxy Mrk 335. Observations made on 1981 November 23 with the MMT Spectrograph in an attempt to confirm their discovery showed only weak, scattered nuclear light at the position of the "nebula"...The authors regret any inconvenience caused by their erroneous "discovery", but suspect they have wasted far more time on this object than anyone else."
(ApJ vol. 218, p. 931) "A conversion factor was inadvertently dropped, and the following correction should be made: In figure 1, the ordinate scale should be multiplied by 10,000. In table 1, the photon fluxes given for the line head and first and second shoulders should be multiplied by 520. No other quantities nor conclusions given in the paper are affected."
I, myself, had to republish an entire table because when I composed the table I wasn't aware than I had skipped a line. All of the entries for the 30-odd stars were off by one star! Fortunately, I used the correct table to base my research upon, not the one I cleaned-up and sent to the Astrophysical Journal for publication. In the example of a paper you have been looking at, no errors have been brought to my attention in the 7 years since it was first published.
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