\n<\/p>\n
A nasty sort of bias called Malmquist bias affects almost every astronomical survey, and the only solution is to\u2026keep doing surveys.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Back in the 1970\u2019s and 80\u2019s astronomers first began to identify a structure known as the Great Attractor, which is defined by the common motion of all the galaxies in our nearby vicinity of the cosmos.<\/p>\n But for over a decade, however, many astronomers weren\u2019t exactly convinced that the Great Attractor existed. Their skepticism was well justified because of a common observational effect in astronomy known as Malmquist bias. Named after the Swedish astronomer Gunnar Malmquist, who first elucidated a discussion of this effect in 1922, this bias is a specialized version of a much more common statistical effect known as selection bias.<\/p>\n \n