False Headlines in This Month's Astronomy News

Nowadays a large fraction of the neuroscience news and the psychology news and the natural history news is clickbait making untrue or unreliable claims. We may hear of basically worthless experimental studies suffering from one or more grave procedural defects such as insufficient sample sizes, a lack of a blinding protocol, unreliable subjective methods for judging fear in animals, dubious "slice and dice" statistical manipulations or a lack of a hypothesis to be tested before gathering data. Or we may hear of some natural history claim based on the skimpiest fossil fragments or dubious projections or doubtful assumptions derived after guesswork was done on fragmentary data about the genomes of extinct species.  But it is not merely neuroscience news and psychology news and natural history news that is infested with untrue headlines. Many of the headlines we read in the astronomy news are untrue.

Let us look at some examples, using only examples from this month (September 2021).  It will come as no suprise that the first example comes from the Daily Galaxy site at www.dailygalaxy.com, an "astronomy news" web site where there very often appears untrue  clickbait headlines.  In many cases the headlines simply fail to match what is stated in the story under the headlines. In many other cases, what is stated in the story is just plane wrong. 

A recent story on the site had this headline: "Fingerprints of the Big Bang: SphereX Mission Will Probe First Seconds of the Universe." But the NASA page describing the SphereX mission mentions nothing at all about it having anything to do with studying the Big Bang. The NASA page describes SphereX as a mission that will "collect data on more than 300 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way in order to explore the origins of the universe." The phrase "to explore the origins of the universe" is inappropriate and inaccurate here, and is not repeated later on the page, when we merely read "Astronomers will use the mission to gather data on more than 300 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in our own Milky Way," without using the phrase "to explore the origins of the universe." There is a type of telescopic mission that helps to shed light on the universe's very early years: one that studies what is called the cosmic background radiation.  The SphereX mission is not such a mission. 

There is actually a reason why it is physically impossible that anyone will ever build a telescope that probes the first seconds of the universe. The reason is that the first 300,000 years of the universe's is forever blocked from being observed.  Cosmologists say that during the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, before any atoms formed, the universe was so dense with matter and energy that any light from the first 300,000 years most have been hopelessly scattered, making observation of the first 300,000 years physically impossible.  Light from the first 300,000 years must have been scattered so bad it would be like passing light through a million prisms, or passing an email message through a million email message scramblers. 

So it will forever be impossible to invent a telescope that "probes the first seconds of the universe," just as it will forever be impossible to invent a telescope that even probes any of the first hundred thousand years of the universe.  You can't look back that far, because the density blocks all observations from the universe's first 100,000 years. 

Another Daily Galaxy article this month had this headline: "Mysteries of the Primordial Universe Before the Big Bang." Nothing whatsoever is known of any state of the universe before the Big Bang, which was, as far as we know, the absolute beginning of the universe. 

Then there is a recent Daily Galaxy story entitled "NASA's ENIGMA: 'We Have Found the Building Blocks of Life.' "  This headline is misleading, and it does not correspond to any discovery made by NASA of any building blocks of life.  The building blocks of macroscopic life are cells, and the building blocks of one-celled microscopic life are mainly functional proteins. Neither cells nor functional proteins have ever been observed in space except in spaceships of space stations built by humans.  The story does not even mention any discovery of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids).  

In the text of the story we read a statement that is half false and half true. After someone refers to proteins as "nanomachines," we read: "We are making huge strides in understanding the evolution of the smallest nano machines that enabled biological metabolism and designing their analogues in the laboratory." To the contrary, while scientists are making some progress in designing artificial proteins, scientists have never made any real progress in understanding the origin of the millions of different types of protein molecules in the animal and plant kingdoms.  The origin of each one of these types of protein molecules is something we would never expect to occur under Darwinian assumptions.  

Most types of protein molecules are arrangements of hundreds of amino acids in just the right way to achieve a functional end. We would no more expect any such protein molecule to arise accidentally than we would expect a functional paragraph of text to arise from some horde of typing monkeys.  You do not get around this difficulty by evoking "natural selection," for appealing to such a thing is like imagining some quality judge among the typing monkeys who will make copies whenever one of them produces a functional paragraph by random keystrokes. There will be no accidental functional paragraph with or without such a presence. In the scientific paper here, a Harvard scientist says, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."

Then in early September there was a story on www.scitechdaily.com entitled "Astrophysicists Identify 'Significant Reservoirs' of Organic Molecules Necessary To Form the Basis of Life."  The story discussed University of Leeds observations of three chemicals (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) that are neither the building blocks of life nor the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life. It is not at all true that these chemicals are "necessary to form the basis of life." I can find no mention of cyanoacetylene being present in any organism. Acetonitrile is a toxic substance.  A wikipedia.org article on cyclopropenylidene says, "On Earth, cyclopropenylidene is only seen in the laboratory due to its reactivity."

A person being interviewed by the story mentions some chemicals (amino acids and sugars) that are actually building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life, but these chemicals were not detected when the reported observations were made (and are mentioned only once in the scientific paper, in an extraneous "name dropping" type of way not referring to an observation). A clumsy attempt is made to associate the observed biologically worthless chemicals with important unobserved molecules on kind of grounds like the grounds that the first could be rearranged into the second.  This is as lame as trying to suggest that the sentence "dsdgsaiu weasdg owqeweqow nsdosa ndgodenw qoenewqn qwent weqodr tnqwe oqowent weqt nqwe odsan odgagns" is kind of a useful instruction because the letters could be rearranged into a useful instruction.  

Another press report on this University of Leeds study uses the common shady reporting technique of the unattributed quote. The press report has the false news headline "Chances of alien life in our galaxy are ‘far more likely than first thought.’" But who is it said this? The story does not mention anyone saying such a thing, and we should suspect that no one actually said that.  The observations did nothing to show that life is more likely than we thought. The story makes the incorrect statement, "They found large reservoirs of precursor molecules which are 'stepping stones' to complex molecules needed for life, such as sugars, amino acids and ribonucleic acid." No, the three molecules observed are not "stepping stones" to sugars, amino acids or ribonucleic acids. You cannot make any of those things by tweaking cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, or  cyclopropenylidene. 

The original press release by the University of Leeds began with this statement: "Analysis of unique fingerprints in light emitted from material surrounding young stars has revealed 'significant reservoirs' of large organic molecules necessary to form the basis of life, say researchers."  This single sentence contains three errors.  First, the molecules in question (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) are not at all necessary for life, and  are neither building blocks of life nor any of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life or multicellular life. Second, none of the three molecules is a large organic molecule. Large organic molecules contains scores or hundreds or thousands of atoms  (most protein molecules have thousands of atoms); but none of the three molecules in question (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) has more than six atoms in it. The three molecules in question (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) are correctly described as some of the smallest of all known organic molecules.  The error of calling such molecules "large organic molecules" occurs in the title of the scientific paper. Nowadays the titles of scientific papers often contain erroneous language. 

Third, nothing remotely like "reservoirs" were detected (the term referring to a lake-like supply). The observations of these organic molecules are observations of extremely tenuous amounts roughly 100 million trillion times less dense than the density of matter in a reservoir.   Table 3 of the relevant paper lists a total of roughly 10²¹ grams of the three chemicals occurring over a length of 50 astronomical units.  An astronomical unit is the distance between the earth and the sun. A cube with a size of 50 astronomical units contains 10⁴¹ cubic centimeters, to use a figure I get when doing a Google search for "50 astronomical units in cubic centimeters."  So the so-called "reservoirs" contain the three organic molecules in an amount of roughly .00000000000000000001 gram per cubic centimeter, which is a density about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times less than the density of matter in a reservoir of water. 

The densities of these molecules (cyanoacetylene, acetonitrile, and cyclopropenylidene) in space are clarified by Figure 1 of the paper here, where we get some figures on fractional abundances of various chemicals in the interstellar medium between stars. Using the figures in that table, and the commonly stated figure that molecular clouds have a density of about 300 molecules per cubic centimeter (300 million molecules per cubic meter), we can make the table below:

Molecule	Sym-bol	Relative abundance in molecular clouds	Absolute abundance in a molecular cloud with an average density of 300 million molecules per cubic meter
cyanoacetylene	HC3N	About 1 particle in 100 million	Roughly 3 molecules per cubic meter
acetonitrile	CH3CN	About 1 particle in a billion	Less than 1 molecule per cubic meter
cyclopropenylidene	C3H2	Negligible	Negligible

So the densities of these molecules in the so-called "reservoirs" is something like  100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than an actual reservoir  (which contains about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 water molecules per cubic centimeter). Both the press release and the scientific paper  have misled us greatly by referring to "reservoirs" of such chemicals, a falsehood about as bad as calling a sneeze a "gigantic flash flood thunderstorm downpour." 

There has long been in use a term in astronomy to refer to extremely sparse scatterings of molecules in space: the term "cloud," as used in the phrase "molecular cloud." The term has always been objectionable, because such "molecular clouds" are vastly less dense than earthly clouds. According to the source here, molecular clouds in space have a density of about 2 x 10^-22 gram per cubic centimeter, which is roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than the density of earthly clouds (only about .000001 gram per cubic centimeter). Earthly clouds are very roughly about a million times less dense than liquid water.  When astronomers eager for publicity start using the term "reservoir" rather than "cloud" to refer to  molecular clouds, they are making it sound as if certain units of space are a million times more dense than earthly clouds, when such units of space are  roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000 times less dense than earthly clouds. Such language is something like a billionfold trillionfold deception, and is numerically far more outrageous than some pauper with a net worth of a few pennies insinuating he is one of the world's richest billionaires. 

 I have referred above to only stories from September 2021. Documenting all of the misleading news clickbait astronomy stories of the past five years would require a long volume. 

Let us compare the amount of clickbait and misleading news in two different areas: astronomy and high technology.  There is some clickbait and hype on sites such as www.wired.com devoted mainly to covering developments in high technology, but not that much. Why? Because the high-tech world has been very good over the years at providing a steady stream of impressive new devices and software. So you can have a very exciting site discussing developments in high technology, without having to do much hype and clickbait.  Nowadays there's always some exciting new app or phone model or gaming device or game that can be discussed.  Things have worked better than anyone dreamed back around 1990, when few dreamed that palm-sized devices would be far more powerful than any desktop computer then available. 

But in the astronomy world, we have a different situation.  Things haven't worked out as well as people hoped around 1960. It was hoped that Mars or Venus might be fairly habitable. That didn't work out. It was hoped that life would be found on Mars. That did not occur, according to most experts. It was greatly hoped that attempts to listen to radio signals from other civilizations living on other planets would be successful. This has not occurred, despite decades of efforts. So in some ways the situation in astronomy (not very much exciting happening since 1970) has been rather the opposite of what happened in the high tech world (a steady stream of very  exciting outcomes occurring since about 1977). 

So what do you do if you have some astronomy web site, trying to keep up your readership (or an agency like NASA trying to keep up your funding)? You may feel a need to resort to hype and clickbait and "carnival barking" to keep people interested. If this only involved people wasting some screen time checking out "not much there" headlines, it would not be so bad.  But sometimes this hype and clickbait and "carnival barking" involves leading people to false ideas about matters of great philosophical importance.  Very much of the misleading astronomy news has been helping to spread the erroneous idea that scientists are gaining an understanding of natural origins of life or intelligent life, something that has not at all been occurring.  

In a recent essay on science, a writer states, " In my experience, it is the norm, rather than the exception, for cited claims in popular science books and review papers to misstate the claims of their sources." You might reasonably make the same claim about university press releases, which nowadays tend to have ridiculous  amounts of hype, exaggeration and untruth about the studies they are discussing (like the case I just discussed of three different errors in the first sentence of a university press release).  It would be naive to place the blame for this entirely on careless writers in university press offices. The blame also must be placed on the authors of scientific papers, who often give inaccurate titles to their papers, and often allow wildly inaccurate press releases about their research to be published by their universities, without making sure their research is described by an accurate press release.  It is rather obvious why such oversight conveniently occurs: when a sensationalized misleading  news press release goes out, more people will read and cite a scientific study (to the benefit of the authors of the paper, who are judged partially by how many people have cited their papers).  

So the scientist said while laughing loudly