The Astronomy Fire Hose Continues to Flow
The press conferences at AAS meetings are always featuring cutting-edge science, attended by a really good press corps with members with very good science backgrounds. I remember attending a press presentation once that presented some very exciting science and good images. The topic was on black holes and the Q&A after the main presentation reminded me of a science colloquium back when I was in research. Very probing and astute questions were asked and the astronomers were kept hopping. After it was over, I overheard one of the presenters say to a colleague, “That was like defending my thesis!”
It helps that many scientists DO get into the swing of working with the writers, and work hard to give their stories good hooks that allow journalists to make the complex stories clear to their audiences.
One of my favorite stories/headlines from this meeting (so far) came this morning. The headline is SLOAN AND THE SEVEN – make that eight — DWARFS—Many More Predicted.” The story is that with Sloan Digital Sky Survey data, a team has been able to find a number of dwarf galaxies near our own Milky Way. This is great news, but there’s an underlying story that identifies dark matter (yes, that ubiquitous dark matter component of the universe) as a player in everything from the formation history of these dwarfs to their distribution (and possible links to our galaxy). It’s one of those headlines that fronts a multiple set of stories, all in one press release. So, speaking of cool headlines, Gemini Observatory (for which I do a lot of editing and writing work) put out a pair of press releases today. They describe some fairly complex science done with studies of rare abnormal stars in our own galaxy and a ring of warm material that is thought to be encircling the active galactic nucleus of galaxy Centaurus A (NGC 5128). The first one is Some Rare Abnormal Stars may have White Dwarf Parents. The story focuses on two types of stars that seem to have really high amounts of oxygen-18, a type of oxygen not often seen in stars.
The cute headline for Centaurus A and its circumnuclear ring was Small Warm Doughnut Feeds Theories of Extragalactic Black Holes. The story describes efforts to find a torus (ring-shaped object) around the center of this galaxy. It’s there because there are emissions that imply it’s there. But, no one has been able to “see” it, leading people to assume that it’s smaller than we can resolve with our existing telescopes. It’s important to find these rings of material because they can tell us a lot about what’s happening in and around the cores of active galaxies. And, it was fun coming up with a headline that would hook people’s attention to what might, at first glance, look like a story too complex to tell to a general audience. You be the judge—do the headlines help sell the stories?