Radio Galaxy Zoo Talk

Grossly misleading descriptions of black holes, why?!? (a rant)

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    [rant]

    "In Search of Erupting Black Holes" is the heading of this Zooniverse project, on the main page, immediately under the Galaxy Zoo: Radio logo.

    "Black holes cannot be directly observed, since light cannot escape from them;" the "Why do astronomers need your help?" section begins, "... the jets of material spewed out by these supermassive black holes can be observed ... " the first para in that section ends. "For instance, observing the host galaxy allows us to determine its distance, which is critical to understanding how big and how luminous the black hole actually is." That's how that section ends.

    Yes, truly, your eyes are not deceiving you ... the SCIENTIST (or SCIENTISTs) who wrote that truly said black holes are "luminous" ! 😮. No, not enough emotion; 😮10

    Sure, you can find a thousand, nay tens of thousands, of articles in the popular press like this, portraying super-massive black holes (SMBHs) as 'erupting', as 'spewing out matter', as 'incredibly bright', as ... and, in a substantial minority of the same articles, a direct or indirect reference to the fact that "black holes cannot be directly observed, since light cannot escape from them."

    Yes, it's true that if you want to understand - deeply understand - why light cannot escape from black holes you need to understand Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GTR, or GR), and that to do that you have to wrap your mind around some pretty counter-intuitive ideas (as well as some mathematics your high school teacher likely never even hinted at). It's also true that a great many science journalists1 - not to mention those who work for mass circulation dailies/websites - likely do not have such a deep understanding.

    But that is surely not true of the SCIENTISTs here, in RGZ, is it?

    Yes, it's true that modelling how the mass and angular momentum of a SMBH interacts with and affects matter around it - the accretion disk, the plasma, the jets, ... - is not for the faint of heart (if you want to grasp the full extent of the underlying physics), but it's also true that this is a most wonderous thing, a triumph of the mind (starting with Einstein's) in explaining how the universe works! But doesn't that mean that those who do grasp this wonder need to work extra hard to explain it accurately? To not - implicitly or explicitly - assume that the readers are so, um, stupid (sorry, but this is a rant) or uninterested as to blindly and blithely accept the obvious contradictions in portraying SMBHs as being things from which even light cannot escape AND as erupting (like a volcano)?!?

    [/rant]

    1 Obligatory: I too was once a science journalist (Universe Today). I tried hard not to write the kinds of things this rant is about, but it's all too possible that I failed 😦

    Posted