ANOTHER round of ink for the Oort beast Tyche, ghostly gas giant of the deep twilight
CREDIT S.WestRes Inst, via Space.com
Here’s an example of a feature story that got mistaken for breaking news – not by its publisher, but by a few other news outlets.
Planet X, under various guises, is a staple of science fiction that occasionally drifts like a hyperbolic comment through the orbits of science. Take Tyche. It’s been imagined for years, a planet bigger than Jupiter but far, far from the Sun, at the edge of the Oort cloud. All this inferred from oddities in the paths of comets it may have deflected. It’s not crazy, not a crank idea, merely a hypothesis with scant data.
The latest round (and we’ll get momentarily to earlier rounds) appears to have arisen at The Independent where Paul Rodgers, on weekdays a copy editor or sub-editor in UK parlance, wrote it as a Sunday feature story. Rodgers is expanding his career to include science, and the Sunday pages get his offerings often. The hunt is on for this distant, gassy orb, he writes, and data gathered by NASA’s WISE spacecraft – optimized for detecting comets and asteroid - could be the clincher to its reality. The Independent included a nicely done graphic (except for an astronomical misspelling, and take that literally) to show where it is. The story has a feature feel, explains that two University of Louisiana astrophysicists have been pushing this idea uphill for a long time, and even mentions one flaw in the notion that, by implication, is a reason it has not carried the day among their colleagues.
Many followed this as breaking news. The angle at most is – who needs Pluto? - that we may soon enough have again nine full-sized planets in our solar system.
Other Stories This Week:
- CBC : New huge planet may hide in solar system ; Yes, but this also cites a blog post from Bad Astronomy‘s Phil Plait on why to keep eyebrow cocked.
- PC Magazine – Petre Pachal : Is There a Massive Planet Hidden in hte Outer Reaches of the Solar System?
- Huffington Post – Dean Praetorius: Tyche, Giant Hidden Planet, May Exist In Our Solar System ;
- NY Daily News – Michael Sheridan: Could space telescope WISE reveal Planet X? Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire hope so ;
- Village Voice – Nick Greene: The solar System Has a Badass New Planet Named Tyche ;
- Space.com via Fox News – Natalie Wolchover: Astronomers Question Existence of Solar System’s Mystery Planet Tyche ; Good for Wolchover – she dissects the claim and traces its roots. One question is why, upon finding this feature is not news, she didn’t just tell the assignment desk this is old so forget it? Still, well done. Her beat, by the say, is listed as “Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer.”
- Time Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: Mystery Planet: Is a Rogue Giant Orbiting Our Sun? This is a good one. Lemonick, an old hand at these things, treats it as a sampling of internet-fed frenzy, and traces its origins nicely. He gets into corollaries, such as the Nemesis death star idea.
- Time Magazine NewsFeed – Elizabeth Tyler: A Nine-Planet Solar system Once More? NASA Telescope May Reveal New Planet, Tyche; This ran two days ago, a credulous rewrite. One surmises it is what inspired Lemonick’s piece, one bullet up.
- MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: 2012 Watch: Don’t fret over PlanetX ; Boyle, too, seems to be making a sigh, and patiently explaining that this is not a nutso-fruitcake idea, but it’s not new and not yet persuasive to the rest of the academy. He even, thank you very much, includes a link to the Louisiana pair’s latest paper, see Grist below.
The lesson here is that other major outlets did not pick up the Independent’s piece, but it appears to have set off a frenzy among bloggers and aggregators, and the difference is, one expects, that other reporters did some checking. This is not so much a dig at the original story, clearly to these eyes a feature. One that merits checking, but such checking would show it has little that is essentially new. The waiting evidence from the WISE telescope seems too slender a reed to support fresh coverage generally.
Anyway, even this has been reported before:
- Wired Science – Lisa Grossman (Nov. 29, 2010): Dark Jupiter May Haunt Edge of Solar System ; Much the same, in its info, as the Independent story – also more calmly composed.
- Space.com – Charles Q. Choi (Dec. 1) Giant Stealth Planet May Explain Rain of Comets from Solar System’s Edge ; Ditto.
- Rp.pl – Krsysztof Urbanski: (Dec 7) Czy Słońce obiega gigantyczna planeta. I can’t read a word of it. Looks like Polish. But seems to be the same story.
Grist for the Mill:
Original paper in Icarus, via arXiv: Persistent Evidence of a Jovian Mass Solar Companion in the Oort Cloud ;
- Charlie Petit
