Space science from Bergen on the cover of Science magazine
Every year, about 15,000 research papers are submitted to the editors of Science Magazine seeking publication. The acceptance rate averages around 5.3%, which equals roughly 800 published papers per year.
The fight for the cover story is also a tough one: From the 800 published papers only 52 submissions are accepted as cover stories in the renowned weekly journal.
We researched all of these numbers when we were approached by the Birkeland Centre for Space Science at the University of Bergen with that specific, stated goal:
The cover.
The team from UiB had a paper with groundbreaking findings on gamma-ray flashes born in thunderstorms.
A terrestrial gamma-ray flash is a burst of gamma radiation, a fraction of a millisecond long, fired upward out of a thunderstorm, powered by lightning.
The flash documented in the paper was detected by ASIM aboard the International Space Station. ASIM is an observatory led from Denmark whose gamma-ray detector was built in Bergen.
Like most people, we had never heard about gamma-ray flashes.
However, Professor Nikolai Østgaard fixed that with a chalkboard and faith in our ability to learn.
We must admit we felt some “imposter syndrome” in the earliest and most technical discussions of this phenomenon, but we eventually understood.
Professor Østgaard’s lecture and chalkboard drawings remain the most important part of the brief.
Nobody has ever seen a gamma-ray flash with their own eyes. There is nothing to photograph, the radiation has no colour, and the phenomenon is over in under a millisecond.
The cover image must be a compromise between actual science and visual impact. It has to be scientifically correct and visually striking simultaneously. That was our instinct, and that happened to be exactly what the editors of Science were looking for.
The flash in motion.
Thank you to the scientists at UiB for the lectures, the chalkboard illustrations, the patience and the faith in our creative skills.
It did pay off.
