A lot of outlets have pretty good oldest-galaxies news stories today (or new galaxies as seen in the oldest light yet.)  They got them from the American Astronomical Society meeting in DC teams. UC Santa Cruz and another multi-institution bunch led by an Arizona State man describe tiny, growing galaxies seen in murky light emitted about 600 million years after the Big Bang, a time when crucial structural features of the universe we see today were organizing themselves.

We’ll round up this news in a moment. But first:  the basic story has been reported before – in October by Science News. Its Ron Cowen not only had the essence of what was presented this week, but this past Sunday ran another piece on yet-farther-away suspected galaxies being bruited by both groups – and that the astronomers didn’t even mention to reporters at or listening in on the Mariott Wardman Park hotel press conference.

*UPDATE: At NatureNews, Lizzie Buchen also noted, in late December, the competing reports on hints of embryonic galaxies even before those getting most coverage by media. The link goes to a summary, most of the story is behind a subscriber wall.

Cowen toots his own horn a bit today, in a blog on his scoops and why the astronomers didn’t spontaneously share their very latest with reporters. He’s entitled to self-congratulation.  His editors also buffed-up his earlier story today and re-ran it in light of everybody else finally learning of the news.

This site has posted on both his previous stories, and attentive readers may recall that The Tracker also has several times noted one way – aside from attending meetings where few other reporters show up – he gets these excloos. He logs on to arXiv.org/astro-ph and scans down the titles of papers that researchers have uploaded to this pre-journal publication free-for-all.

The point is that even in something as arcane as astrophysics and astronomy, science journalism used to be more competitive than now (well, newspapers and weeklies then had so many more of us..). I used to look in at astro-ph five years ago, back when I was a breaking-news scrivener, a trick I think I learned from Tom Siegfried, then of the Dallas Morning News and now editor at Science News. It was no secret. Is anybody else doing it regularly? Maybe some at NYTimes? Maybe at specialty pubs like Sky & Telescope, or space.com? Maybe ace Hollander astro-writer Govert Schilling? Cowen does have an advantage – space science is pretty much his whole beat. Generalists rarely have time to plow through these sometimes formidable papers on line. But it does pay off for Cowen. Hats off.

There is nothing amiss in outlets, upon finally catching on to this news, now  running stories. It’s interesting and it’s something the reporters and  nearly all their readers heard before.

Today’s Early Galaxy News, a Sampling:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Hubble telescope shows earliest photo of universe ; Headline question: is this the earliest photo of the universe? Aren’t images of the cosmic background radiation photos, of a sort?
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Hubble snaps galaxies at birth ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Anne Minard: Earliest Knowns Galaxies Spied in Deep Hubble Picture ; Not only evocative, but calling it a deep picture is a smart use of the terminology astronomers use.
• The Australian/AFP: Hubble telescope finds old galaxies ; Just thinking – wouldn’t early galaxies be more accurate? It was a long time ago, but they weren’t old at all. Not then.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Hubble telescope glimpses universe’s earliest galaxies ;
• Times (UK) - Mark Henderson : Hubble telescope finds three ‘undiscovered’ galaxies ;
• Santa Cruz Sentinel – Megha Satyanarayana : Universe’s baby pictures, courtesy of Hubble Telescope ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Yudhijit Bhattacharjee: Hubble Spots Oldest Galaxies Yet ; Clearly written piece with some concise physics and an aside on supermassive black holes.
• CNN: Hubble peers back 13.2billion years, finds ‘primordial’ galaxies ; This is rewritten straight off the press release from NASA, which it acknowledges – and it even uses the press officer as its quotable source.  Honest enough. But would laid-off and ex-CNNer Miles O’Brien have done that? Not likely.

Grist for the Mill:

Hubble STSci Press Release ; Arizona St. Univ. Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.