Got the exoplanetary blues

That image

There has been a lot of news coverage in the last day or two of the discovery of a blue exoplanet - a planet orbiting another star. It is quite a feat to detect colour at this distance, but I feel that the news coverage is tainted by a combination of misapprehension and downright naughtiness.

To begin with, why should we care that the planet is blue (and hence splash it across the media)? After all, it has to be some colour. So what if it's blue? The only reason I can think for getting excited is that traditionally this colour has been associated with life. We know that Earth is primarily blue when seen from space because of its oceans and so link this with a friendly environment. What this misses is that Earth isn't the only planet in the solar system that is blue. Both Uranus and Neptune are blue too.

This blue coloration is not because these gas giants distant from the Sun are ideal for life. Quite the reverse. It is because that's the right sort of colour for a methane atmosphere. So we shouldn't get too excited, given two out of the three blue planets we know well aren't anywhere near inhabitable. In fact, to give the news media their due, they have all reported that HD 189733b, located around 63 light years away, is probably blue because of liquid or fragmentary silica in the atmosphere. And most have pointed out that it is a gas giant. But given that, it's not quite clear why they have got so excited about it. There is something worse, though.

Pretty well every bit of coverage I've seen has carried this stunning image from NASA/ESA. And why wouldn't they? It puts some of the pictures of planets in our own system to shame, let alone a planet 63 light years away. Of course, the reason it is so good is that it is an artist's impression. It's not a photograph. The colour detection has been through changes in the colour spectrum when the planet passes behind its star, not through direct observation, and certainly not through stunning photographs. And yet almost all the coverage I've seen has not mentioned that this picture is a fake.

Take, for instance, the write-up in the usually excellent i newspaper. They have given it a quarter page. Of that, maybe two thirds is the picture and the rest is a small text box. The closest it comes to saying the image isn't genuine is saying the planet is 'a deep cobalt blue, data gathered by the Hubble space telescope shows.' I'm sorry, I can guarantee you that a fair percentage of even the excellently educated readers of the i will come away convinced that they have seen a picture of this planet. It wouldn't be hard to put in an 'artist's impression' caption.

If you think I am being over concerned, it is because I think this demonstrates a widespread attitude in the media that you can loose and free with science reporting. Just imagine this was a story about a celebrity committing an offence and the paper mocked up a 'photograph' of it happening without labelling it as an artist's impression. It would cause on uproar. Just because this is science doesn't mean that such deception is acceptable.

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope

Search This Blog