You might have heard the news out of last week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, that the Hubble Space Telescope had found evidence for the most distant galaxies yet discovered. Using the newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3, HST did a close-up examination of some likely candidates in the Ultra Deep Field, and found galaxies at redshifts of 7 or 8 (meaning the universe is now 8 or 9 times bigger than it was when the light was emitted). That corresponds to about 600 million years after the Big Bang, which pushes back the era of galaxy formation quite a bit.
But wait! Over at Science News, Ron Cowen points out that a team led by Rychard Bouwens and Garth Illingworth of UC Santa Cruz already has a paper on the arxiv that uses similar techniques to identify three galaxies with a redshift of 10, corresponding to only 450 million years after the Big Bang. And, as Cowen mentions in a blog post, the paper was available since last month.
Constraints on the First Galaxies: z~10 Galaxy Candidates from HST WFC3/IR
Authors: R.J. Bouwens, G.D. Illingworth, I. Labbe, P.A. Oesch, M. Carollo, M. Trenti, P.G. van Dokkum, M. Franx, M. Stiavelli, V. Gonzalez, D. MageeAbstract: The first galaxies likely formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Until recently, it has not been possible to detect galaxies earlier than ~750 million years after the Big Bang. The new HST WFC3/IR camera changed this when the deepest-ever, near-IR image of the universe was obtained with the HUDF09 program. Here we use this image to identify three redshift z~10 galaxy candidates in the heart of the reionization epoch when the universe was just 500 million years old. These would be the highest redshift galaxies yet detected, higher than the recent detection of a GRB at z~8.2. The HUDF09 data previously revealed galaxies at z~7 and z~8… [snipped]
So why are galaxies at redshift 8 considered news, if galaxies at redshift 10 have already been discovered? As Charlie Petit talks about at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the difference seems to be that the former were announced at a press briefing, while the latter just appeared on arxiv.
For better or for worse, conventional science journalism has been cut back to the point where most reporters have no choice but to wait for press releases to appear to write a story. They don’t have the resources to scan through arxiv postings every day — and even if they did, the precious newsworthy nuggets are rather sparsely scattered through the mass of Kuhnian normal science. And let’s not even think about the idea that journalists should spend time (and money) going to lots of conferences and talks and chatting with scientists about what’s hot in their fields these days — the resources just aren’t there.
There is some room for blogs to help out here. A blog by a respectable scientist can point to interesting stories that didn’t appear in any press releases, and journalists can follow up. (I know it’s happened here before.) But the thing about blogs is that they’re remarkably non-systematic; bloggers mention things because they personally find them interesting, not because they feel a duty to the wider public. The nature of journalism is changing rapidly, and it’s not clear how things will eventually shake out. I certainly hope that we continue to enjoy the work of people like Cowen, who make the extra effort to find good science stories and spread them widely.
“And let’s not even think about the idea that journalists should spend time (and money) going to lots of conferences and talks and chatting with scientists about what’s hot in their fields these days — the resources just aren’t there.”
Hopefully I’m not the only one who took issue with this. Why shouldn’t we expect newspapers that want to report on science to have competent people who can scan and read through the new additions to arxiv?
You can “expect” it all you want. But newspapers are busy firing science journalists, not asking them to spend more time on each story.
It’s very simple: News is not free. At minimum, a journalist has to eat. They might even want some shelter if they live outside of the tropics. Having a way to disseminate the fruits of their labors would also seem to be a basic requirement. It wouldn’t hurt to have them be highly educated (autodidacts are always welcome) in the sciences if you want them to report on science.
If the blogosphere continues to grow at the current pace (and I can’t imagine it won’t), it may cover all the old territory through the efforts of enthusiastic scientists. But instead of having the news handed to us on a platter, we’ll have to become hunter-gatherers, which is kind of a drag if you’re busy. I hunt and gather even though I’m too busy, but lots of people just tune out unless you stick it in their faces. That’s a scary prospect, when you consider how important science literacy is.
We’ve gotta pry open the wallets, folks. I’m not saying necessarily that we should resuscitate “old media”, but a high level of quality and convenience is going to take money. Lots of money. If enough people become convinced that all news should be made available gratis, not only are they living in a fantasy utopia, they’re starving those of us who ARE willing to pay out of the goods by making high-quality information available only to specialists and those educated enough to even know where to look. I know you open-sourcers are convinced the world can run on impeccable ethics alone, but I not only think you’re dreaming, I think you are ON CRACK if you believe there’s enough of that good will around to even keep you fed.
I don’t see much of a future for the newspapers, but I do hope that something reasonable fills the void they leave. What I don’t know, but if it’s comprehensive and of high quality (perhaps I flatter myself thinking I’d be able to tell), I’ll pay handsomely. You all should, too. In fact, I’d say it’s your civic responsibility.
In fact, over the last 4-5 months there have been MANY papers on the arxiv using these data to find high redshift (z>6) galaxies. I’m not even sure this is a complete list.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1806
http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.2255
http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.5183
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0001
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0077
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0838
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1098
http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.1338
http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.4263
That’s the observational side; but what does the theoretical/computational side say to this? There are some groups doing computer simulations on structure and galaxy formation, aren’t there? What do these simulations say when the first galaxies should have formed?
Well, the media can’t be at fault in this particular example, because both of these results come from the same team! Illingworth was the relevant speaker at the press conference last week.
George
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It seems to me that’s it’s always been quite a small minority of newspapers who would actually send journalists to meetings like those of the AAS. Perhaps the Washington Post and New York Times, in this country, and very few others. I happened to bump into journalists from several of the usual suspects at the latest AAS meeting, for example, and didn’t notice a HUGE decline in numbers (I also didn’t do a survey, so my impressions could be wrong). Good science journalists who cover LOCAL issues well at your average big city paper have always been in short supply. My gut feeling is that the number of science journalists who have been cut from newspaper staffs mirrors reasonably well the numbers of say, sports journalists, who have been cut. Of course, the absolute numbers started out very different. Your newspaper may not have a good science reporter anymore, but they may also not have a NBA beat reporter anymore. Science blogs like this one can certainly help fill in the gap in science journalism. Unfortunately, too many of them (NOT this one) just mirror press releases without really adding any value. I’d be much more worried if good general issue science magazines like Discover or specific ones like Sky & Telescope started to go the way of the dinosaurs and newspapers.
Why is Kuhnian science not newsworthy? Perhaps public understanding of science would be better if journalists simply picked papers to report at random, instead of putting an emphasis on “important” ones.
Perhaps unintentionally, this sentence captures the true problem. Although I suspect the author meant, “no choice but for to wait press releases to appear before the reporters can write a story”, it can also be read as, “no choice but for to wait for press releases, before the reporters can appear to write a story”.
My guess is that modern publishing methods (notably the Web) allow for more and better information dispersal and aggregation. If you read any history of science and knowledge with any insight, you cannot help but be impressed at how often concepts or knowledge were discovered or partly understood, only to be lost or overlooked.
My guess is that this will happen less often now. The countervailing force is the explosion of information (and sometimes disinformation), which means that we are essentially bringing a better tool to bear against a bigger problem. So maybe lost or underappreciated knowledge will still happen at the same sort of rate in percentage terms.
However the ability to sample vast stores of information and easily link to original sources should not be a bad thing on balance. And automation can leverage those data sources on a huge scale, giving us all some breathing room.
The medium is the message.
The medium is the message.
The medium is the message.
Here is a good article to read about the decline of science journalism.
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/01/why-decline-rebirth-of-environmental-journalism-matters/
this is super weird
Given how much research is published, I doubt that every researcher in the field is even able to keep up with his or her own specialty. Surely, even a small group of journalists on the astronomy beat could still miss an important story. That’s actually one of the great things about the internet. Journalism can be a participatory process. The reporter listens to the traffic and opens with a story, but that story is just the starting point. The community gets to chime in. Everyone gets heard; everyone gets a better story. It’s like those sites that post the latest FOIA info dump and ask everyone to dig in. They tend to find the good stuff, and provide a sense of balance. It’s the same in science, except science lives with a perpetual info dump. In fact, that’s the great thing about it.
Time was when one actually had to measure a redshift of a galaxy in order to claim that it has such a redshift. And the only way to make sure was to get a spectrum and detect unambiguously at least 2, pref. more emission or absorption lines. Ah, the silly old days! Nowadays you can claim to be finding galaxies on unbelievable (pun slightly intended) redshifts, just from a few pictures.
The cold, cruel fact is that the number of galaxies with confirmed, believable redshifts z > 6 is exactly zero. Zilch. All of these faint little blobs are just -candidates- to be at high redshifts, deemed as such on the basis of their broad-band colors, and some modeling. Whereas such “photo-z’s” are well established for the closer galaxies, especially if one has obsservations in several filters and with a high S/N, things get pretty iffy at higher redshifts and fainter fluxes, which is what we are dealing with here. Sure, some of these faint galaxies may indeed be at the claimed redshifts, but none are secure, and it will be a long time before we can measure their spectra and find out for sure.
What is happening here is a combination of two sociological phenomena: the standard of proof in this game has declined gradually over the years, in proportion to the scope of the claims; and there is a bit of a competitive rush going on among the many groups, all of them trying to do exactly the same thing with exactly the same data.
So, I would not blame the journalists for failing to fall for any of these “news”.
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