Scientists Have Figured Out What Colour The Universe Is

What's old is new again?

Over at Business Insider Australia we are told (with some lovely language) that Scientists have figured out what colour the Universe is. You've got to love a new and interesting astronomy story, but alas, the result is rather, well, beige (I refuse to say latte).
But that's not the point of this post. Now, I am not a young man any more, and my memory is not what it was, but I know I had heard this story before, somewhere in the past.

The story doesn't name any scientists or cite an original article, and so I turned to google. Hmmm - virtually the same story appeared in the UK Telegraph in 2009! Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail carry very similar stories.

So this "news" is at least 5 years old! But now we have some names! Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry!

A little more detective work leads to New Scientist article entitled The Universe is not turquoise – it's beige. This story from 2002!!!!!!!! corrects and earlier story in which the colour of the Universe was found to be turquoise! So, we're now looking at a story from 12 years ago!

Deep in the depths of my brain I remembered the entire saga (cards on table, I used to work at the AAO with Karl and Ivan) about how they averaged the colours of galaxies, initially finding the average colour to be bluish and then finding with the correct colour interpretation its actually whitish. In fact, Karl has a nice write up on the who thing here.

BUT why has this story resurfaced? There is no new data, no new analysis, nothing. In fact, seven seconds of thought and clicks takes you to a wikipedia page that points out the original press release with the incorrect colour was in 2001, 13 years ago.

So, is there really no new science news interesting enough to be published this week? Do we have to dig up stories from the past? What do we expect to see next? "Scientists discover the universe is expanding"? "Scientist link the orbit of the moon to the falling of an apple"? or even "Proto-scientists discover this water stuff does not burn"? Come one media, you can do better than this!
Location: Sydney NSW, Australia

Comments

  1. Anonymous9 November 2014 at 17:33

    Maybe we should just be happy they actually published some science, even it was recycled.....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cusp9 November 2014 at 19:08

      Maybe - but there is so much more science out there that could do with the attention :)

      Delete
  2. Anonymous29 January 2018 at 22:17

    teddy day messages for him
    images of teddy day special
    funny images for promises day
    promise day special images hd

    ReplyDelete
  3. zarekianni4 March 2022 at 06:54

    Harrah's Casino & Hotel - Mapyro
    Harrah's Casino & Hotel in Valley 용인 출장마사지 Center is an American-themed 대구광역 출장안마 hotel located on the 서울특별 출장마사지 waterfront in 평택 출장안마 the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. Rating: 4.3 삼척 출장안마 · ‎2 reviews

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Falling into a black hole: Just what do you see?

Image
Everyone loves black holes. Immense gravity, a one-way space-time membrane, the possibility of links to other universes. All lovely stuff. A little trawl of the internets reveals an awful lot of web pages discussing black holes, and discussions about spaghettification, firewalls, lost information, and many other things. Actually, a lot of the stuff out there on the web is nonsense, hand-waving, partly informed guesswork. And one of the questions that gets asked is "What would you see looking out into the universe?" Some (incorrectly) say that you would never cross the event horizon, a significant mis-understanding of the coordinates of relativity. Other (incorrectly) conclude from this that you actually see the entire future history of the universe play out in front of your eyes. What we have to remember, of course, is that relativity is a mathematical theory, and instead of hand waving, we can use mathematics to work out what we will see. And that's what I did. ...
Read more

Journey to the Far-Side of the Sun

Image
There was a movie, in the old days, Journey to the Far-Side of the Sun  (also known as Doppleganger) which (spoiler alert) posits that there is a mirror version of the Earth hidden on the other side of the Sun, sharing the orbit with our Earth. The idea is that this planet would always be hidden behind the Sun, and so we would not know it there there. This idea comes up a lot, over and over again. In fact, it came up again last week on twitter. But there's a problem. It assumes the Earth is on a circular orbit. I won't go into the details here, but one of the greatest insights in astronomy was the discovery of Kepler's laws of planetary motion , telling us that planets move on elliptical orbits. With this, there was the realisation that planets can't move at uniform speeds, but travel quickly when closer to the Sun, while slowing down as their orbits carry them to larger distance.  There has been a lot of work examining orbits in the Solar System, and you can  s...
Read more

Moving Charges and Magnetic Fields

Image
Still struggling with grant writing season, so another post which has resulted in my random musings about the Universe (which actually happens quite a lot). In second semester, I am teaching  electricity and magnetism to our First Year Advanced Class . I really enjoy teaching this class as the kids are on the ball and can ask some deep and meaningful questions. But the course is not ideal. Why? Because we teach from a textbook and the problem is that virtually all modern text books are almost the same. Science is trotted out in an almost historical progression. But it does not have to be taught that way. In fact, it would be great if we could start with  Hamiltonian and Lagrangian  approaches, and derive physics from a top down approach. We're told that it's mathematically too challenging, but it really isn't. In fact, I would start with a book like  The Theoretical Minimum , not some multicoloured compendium of physics. We have to work with what we have! ...
Read more