The Mystery of the Naked Black Hole (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Most, if not all, galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers surrounded by dense clouds of stars. Now, researchers have found one that seems to have lost almost its entire entourage. The team, which reported its find at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, says it doesn't know what stripped the stars away. But it has put forward a tantalizing possibility: The object could be an extremely rare medium-sized black hole, which theorists have predicted but observers have never seen.

Comments

Re:confusing title

[gstoddart]

You totally missed the person's point.

No, I didn't miss it, it's a stupid point.

It's that a "naked singularity" is a very specific term

Which would have no meaning to the intended audience.

This is an important concept in physics

And is, again, too fine of a distinction for the target audience to shove into the headline.

It's using words that can be seen to make sense (you can't see it, so it's an invisibility cloak!), but it gives readers the totally wrong impression of what is being discussed.

As opposed to, what, writing a headline which nobody will want to read the article??

If you publish an academic article on the topic, by all means use as much scientific specificity as you require for a full educated audience who understands the nuances of this. If you publish an internet news story intended for laypeople to read and go "wow, that's kind of cool", you sure as hell don't start throwing around terms which have such highly specific meaning.

The people who know these distinctions aren't the ones reading these articles. The ones who don't know these distinctions don't want a bunch of confusing shit thrown at them which makes them think "I don't want to read this crap because I have no idea what the fuck it means, if I wanted to read a science paper on a naked singularity I'd have majored in fucking physics".

Just who the hell do you think this article was written for? It sure as hell wasn't Stephen Hawking.

Do you ever in your life need to communicate with people with less than complete knowledge on a specific topic? If you do, do you go straight to being an asshole and talking in highly specific nuanced technical language and piss them off?

I'm assuming the link to arxiv.org is incorrect, but a headline like "The Origin of Double-Peaked Narrow Lines in Active Galactic Nuclei I: Very Large Array Detections of Dual AGNs and AGN Outflows" would NEVER make a curious layperson read the damned article ... and you can rest assured, the article on sciencemag.org is NOT targeting the people who understand this highly specific and nuanced disctinction.

Pedantry has its time and place. Appealing to merely curious laypeople isn't one of them.