Awesomely Bad Quasar Article: Science Journalism, I Cry for Thee!

April 9th, 2008

Grrrr!!!

No one better tell me about how science reporting is good and I’m being unfair. I dare you. I double dog dare you.

My research specialty is quasars. I love quasars. I’m a world expert, and I know more than anyone you know about them, and also what we don’t yet know about them. I am asked to referee papers, telescope proposals, and grant proposals regarding quasars all the time.

So let’s start with the article. Again, keep in mind I love them and have spent a big part of my life trying to understand them.

The first thing that struck me was the “image” used. It’s an artist rendition, not an actual photograph of any sort. And it’s sort of a lame one, with a disk, a jet, and background stars, without relevant scales or perspective. It’s this kind of shoddy crap that makes people suspicious of science.

Let’s move on. There’s a line early on, “Thought to number about 100,000 in total, they are among the most mysterious, distant and significant objects in the universe.” The only part of that quote with real content is the number 100,000. There are at least many millions of quasars. We’ve only classified on order of 100,000 quasars as such, but know based on various surveys that there are many more. They are not thought to number about 100,000 in total. Only about 100,000 are known. Those are NOT equivalent statements.

Minor point? Let’s talk about the census. Estimates give you the best idea of actual numbers, while actual count systematically misses people.

Then there’s this winner: “Thankfully, quasars do not occur today. If they did, we wouldn’t be here.”

Well, that’s probably wrong. We’d only have a problem if the Milky Way were a quasar, and the gas and dust in the plane of the galaxy would shield us pretty well. I have my students do this calculation (my non-science majors), and we’re only talking about an object as bright as the moon (assuming none of that pesky gas and dust). Bright, but not life-threatening.

Then this: “Quasars begin life as distant galaxies, and eventually they collapse, and the galaxy and gas is swallowed by the black hole.”

No, no, no, no, no, no!!!!!

This is so freaking wrong I want to cry about the stupidity that gets paid a check. Quasars are accreting supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, constituting only about 1/1000 of a galaxy mass. They suck down some local gas and stars in the central few light years, and when they’ve done that, they shut down and stop shining. The rest of the galaxy goes on in orbital happiness, the same way that the Earth would keep orbiting around the sun if it suddenly became a black hole. We’d be unhappy without that warm sunlight, but we wouldn’t get sucked in and collapse onto the black hole sun.

I’ve used XMM-Newton to study quasars, and the article is nominally about new XMM-Newton observations, although that’s hard to tell at first glance. The XMM image referred to is NOT the image attached to the article.

But before we get to them we get a bit of history involving a couple of Caltech astronomers, which is basically right, except this part stands out:   “Greenstein looked at the photograph that contained the image of the object and noticed that it appeared to be at an incredible distance.”   No, he looked at a spectrum, not an image of the object, and determined a redshift than in conjunction with Hubble’s Law let him estimate a distance.

Then we jump back to non-sequiters like: “That is why they are so far away – when we look at the farthest reaches of space we are seeing back into earlier epochs because of the time it takes the light to reach us. ”

What? They’re far away because their light takes so long to reach us? No. Bullshit. The light takes a long time to reach us because they’re far away. The answer to why quasars were more common in the early universe is fundamental and profound, and not found in a banal circular statement like this.

NEXT sentence: “Today they are believed to be a feast happening at the edge of the universe when an enormous black hole devours vast clouds of gas, stars and even entire galaxies.”

As if you hadn’t guessed, quasars do not devour entire galaxies. Period. Nada. Big no.

Can you guess there’s a reporter misunderstanding a source yet? I’m starting to think it.

The last three paragraphs get to the new observation. Sort of. I am a world expert on quasars, and I have sat multiple times on panels reviewing X-ray telescope proposals to look at quasars, and I can’t tell what the observation or results were! Can you?

Didn’t think so.

I love the last line though. “This is why we need to study quasars: they are wonderful and horrible.”

Amen to that!

If I were cynical, I’d say the same applies to women, our fellow Americans, humans in general, comic books, and the reality shows.

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