This paper has been removed from the CVC Physics archive because of plagerism. The pair of students who presented this paper as their own work are asked to write Maggie Masetti and apologize for passing off her work for your own.

Students, you may get by with plagersim and/or inaccuracies in your research for a short while, but eventually, you will get caught. When this happens, you lose credibility. Thus, do not get lazy and plagerize! In the long run, it hurts you.

It was discovered that the paper that once appeared at this site was plagerized. The entire report was plagerized from a NASA web page. All students are asked to get permission for images used, cite the source of the image, and, of course, not to plagiarize. As their teacher, I did some phrase searches via altavista, but did not catch the phrases that were plagiarized. However, I did receive an email informing me of the plagerism. The good thing about publishing papers on the internet is that plagiarism and errors of content will eventually be brought to light. The entirety of the text was written on X-ray astronomy by Maggie Masetti of NASA, for a learning center for the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite. It was adapted for the web from a print booklet that she also wrote, called "Shedding a New Light on the Universe", NASA publication # NP-1998-01-002-GSFC. You can find her web version of it at: http://rxte.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xte/learning_center/universe/universe.html.

As for the image permission issue, students should be very sure to check which images are NASA's and which aren't and should always ask permission to use them, and then give credit for them. NASA's images are free for educational use (see http://www.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/guideline.html) - but often, non-NASA images are copyrighted, so it is always best to ask permission or at least the very least, cite their usage!

It is my hope that this will be the only page that I will have to remove from our web site in this manner. Be original and thorough with your essays. It is a big universe out there!

--Bill Drennon