Slashdot Mirror
Exoplanet Reports Exaggerated
The Bad Astronomer writes "The reports of the first direct picture of an exoplanet are misleading. The real news is that an image of a probable exoplanet taken in 2008 using a telescope in Hawaii have been confirmed — it's a planet. In fact, exoplanets have been directly imaged before; the first was in 2005. More images of other planets were released in 2008. To be specific: this new planet is the first to be directly imaged orbiting a sun-like star using observations made from the ground. That's actually still quite a technological achievement, but don't be misled by hyperbolic headlines."
I don't believe it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
...but don't be misled by hyperbolic headlines.
Uhm yeah, we're pretty much at the wrong site for that advice...
"Don't be misled by hyperbolic headlines."
Unless it's on /.
Waiting for the first photograph of an exoplanet from an underwater observatory. And you though atmospheric refraction was a pain on land!
An anonymous reader noted a report confirming the first ever exoplanet actually photographed from telescopes on earth. If you still don't know how to read into the media's game of provacative article titles I truly pity you.
For me to go to the original story, post this summary and get a +5 insightful?
Well yeaaahh - did you see the original picture? Glad that got cleared up :)
That being said, it did provide some great amusement value too: image
To be fair, if you browse the comments after things have settled down a bit you generally get the corrections long before most other sites get around to posting corrections (if they ever do). There were several comments in the earlier article that were rated up that say... well, basically exactly what this article says.
Thank you Slashdot, for letting us know that all those other sites that were exagerating the importance with hyperbolic headlines were totally doin it rong!
(To be fair it's usually considered a sign of maturity to be able to admit that you made a mistake after the fact, but just i couldn't resist the dig. Guess i'm not mature enough.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
parabolic headlines myself.
Don't worry I wasn't.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
I wonder if /. editors realize that they could post a follow-up "nothing to see here" clarification for 99% of all news. In fact, I think they should start doing so.
THIS JUST IN!!!ohwaitnevermind.
were a lot of people led to believe this was the first picture of ANY exoplanet?
if this exoplanet was born on a tuesday... nm.
Okay, I'll try not to get too excited about A PHOTOGRAPH OF ANoTHER FRICKIN' PLaNET OUT IN SPACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Full of deluded nerds spewing their childhood mythology as fact? I'm surprised.
I think the uncertainty wasn't whether its indeed a planet, but whether its gravitationally bound to that star. http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=13192
No, the reports are not exaggerated. They exist. They are out there. Whether directly observed with fancy optics or by red shift because of their stars wobbling around their centers of of gravity, they have been detected.
A star doesn't wobble if there is nothing to pull on it, and that means a mass.
We have even observed the spectra of some exoplanets to see what their atmospheres are like because they've passed between their star and ours.
The only exaggerations here are those of peoples' expectations. People want to see at least Voyager quality photographs. Well, it's not happening. Not until we go out there ourselves.
There is a lot about the universe that we have to measure indirectly because of distance and time scales. It doesn't mean that the methods are bogus. To say that not measuring up to popular expectation means "hurr there really isn't much evidence for exoplanets hurr" is bullshit.
Stop reading the tabloids. Stop listening to Fox News who will get it wrong deliberately. Sky & Telescope and Astronomy (both SKY publications) are good enough to start with. And if you want to get it from the horse's mouth these days, you can now more than ever.
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BMO
The above response was triggered by the summary, not by the article itself which is pretty good.
Yeah, yet another bogus Slashdot headline.
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BMO
That's OK, I make it a point to only listen to parabolic headlines, with just a touch of linearity.
The above response was triggered by the summary, not by the article itself which is pretty good.
Yeah, yet another bogus Slashdot headline.
Make up your mind. Are you talking about the summary or the headline?
Your first post makes sense if you just read the headline and jumped to conclusions about what the alleged exaggeration was.
But the summary exactly spells out what is exaggerated: The claim that this was the first exoplanet directly imaged. It is not. It is the first exoplanet around a sun-like star imaged from ground-based telescopes.
That's all in the summary. The summary is perfectly fine, and the headline is fine assuming you then go on to read the summary instead of fill in the blanks, because the previous Slashdot story was, in fact, exaggerated in exactly the way claimed.
This isn't that surprising since the summary was written by the same person who wrote the article which says exactly the same thing only in more detail.
So no, not another bogus /. headline. I know I'm as surprised as you, but you still can't just assume every /. headline is bad. Though I guess it's fairly safe to play the odds, if that's what you were doing. Heh.
The enemies of Democracy are
They aren't in my book so they don't exist.
The headline and summary are both perfectly correct. The only thing bogus here is your knee-jerk ranting without apparently reading closely enough to know what you're ranting against.
Slashdot can now make a new headline about how poory researched a previous headline was?
I'm an astrophysicist and yes I find that most press releases about astronomy are somewhat exaggerated and have hyperbolic titles (it's probably true for anything about science). The obvious reason for that is to make them more attractive to the lay reader. I guess that something like "Imaging of 1RXS 1609 Companion Using Speckle Subtraction" would make people run away. Of course, there should be a compromise between sensationalism and news but it's not always obvious how to spin things the right way, especially when news writers barely know anything about science (believe me, I've had to deal with explaining relativity to the media).
/. and Bad Astronmer's news is all about nitpicking on words. It's even hard for astrophysicists to unambiguously decide which one should be first. My last sentence would simply be that this /. post title "Exoplanet Reports Exaggerated" is totally hyperbolic and exaggerated since I was sure that it was reporting about something really bad like half the exoplanets are in fact not real or something like that...
Regarding this discovery, I don't agree with Bad Astronomer who seemed to have found a way to bash about "exaggerated scientific news" (as I said I do agree with him on the general statement). The other star that Bad Astronomer claims has been imaged in 1995 is Formalhaut. Yes, there is a point source somewhere in the debris disk around the star that is a planet. The thing is that this planet was only found last year, in a recent Hubble image. Astrophysicists saw it in the recent image and went back to the archives and also identified it in the 1995 archive image.
The exoplanet of the present discovery, around the star 1RXS 1609, has been found with direct imaging prior to the detection of the one around Formalhaut. I won't get into the details but all evidence were showing that it was an exoplanet orbiting that star. Of course, there is always a small chance of coincidence but the confirmation just came about -- this is what the news is about -- since clear orbital motion is now visible. So, technically, 1RXS 1609b was the first exoplanet to be formally identified using direct imaging, though Formalhaut's exoplanet had been photographed before without people recognizing it. Off course, this whole
"Directly imaged"? IDTX (I Don't Think Xo). Not unless you consider any Kim Kardashian photo you've ever seen to be "directly imaged".
As for planetary status--they even got Pluto wrong FFS... and that's just an endo-whatever.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Most of the times, I get disinterested reading comments beyond a point if the first few are off topic or just plain silly. In fact, I knew that the story was not as what the title suggested (essentially what Phil is talking about), but I did not bother posting it only for it to get buried.
I'm upset to find that the coding system uses letters, and starts with 'b', eg 51 Pegasi b. I wanted them to use the numeric science fiction system where planets have codes like 'Sol 3' or 'Vega VIII'.
To be specific: this new planet is the first to be directly imaged orbiting a sun-like star using observations made from the ground.
Up Next: new planet photographed before it's discovered by conjoined twins who are blind since birth, standing on a soap box eating fruits while reciting the alphabet backwards. Stoned.
Tagline: "We would've announced it sooner, but my twin was away on a business trip in Bermuda, the triangley part."