Not an expert, but it seems to me that calling it "structure" in the headline without context is extremely clickbaity even if technically correct.
Why not say "Scientists Observe a New Cosmic Structure for the First Time"?
Why not say "Scientists Observe a New Cosmic Structure for the First Time"?
Given that one of the functions of a journalist is to clearly communicate, they're either incompetent or they're deliberately misleading. And it's pretty clear it's the second.
When has journalism ever stuck to facts? When has the “news” been more than stories and opinion?
Hint: Never
Your assumptions aren’t based in fact and smack of elitism. Press has no responsibility to meet your personal idea of competency.
Read: A History of News by Mitchell Stephens https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1854941W/A_history_of_news
Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French_journalism
And frankly when you or anyone starts with "Respectfully", you're typically not. Your post certainly only has a thin veneer.
Again, who are you that your standards are worthy meeting?
The role of press is to exist.
The sooner you understand this then you’ll have a better appreciation for all press outlets even those you disagree with.
It's not even that "structure" necessarily implies planned assembly. There are "structures" in biology, geology, and meteorology, and none imply a builder or designer.
From the preprint - "The South Pole Wall rivals the Sloan Great Wall in extent, at a distance a factor two closer. The iconic structures that have transformed our understanding of large scale structure have come from the observed distribution of galaxies assembled from redshift surveys: the Perseus−Pisces filament (Giovanelli & Haynes1982), the CfA Great Wall (de Lapparent et al.1986), the Sloan Great Wall (Gott et al. 2005)"
To do this you have to focus on communicating understanding rather than pure technical accuracy.
If journalists behave this way they can be used by anyone to spread their message unfiltered. This is not what I expect of quality journalism and I will not ever pay for such a careless "work".
Copying headlines can be done by machines more efficiently.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab9952
Discovered -> "Observe" is better
Gigantic Structure -> "Cosmic structure" is better than the subjective "gigantic", as everything cosmic is by definition gigantic and it seems to imply some sort of amazement at its size
in a
Hidden Zone of Space -> "Obscured" zone of space would again be better
So how about "First Observation of Cosmic Structure in Obscured Zone of Space"
I'm not an editor, and if I can come up with a more accurate and less sensationalized title, one can only conclude that whichever editor was behind this specific headline was deliberate in their choice of its clickbaity feel
And it is one of the largest we’ve seen, and it’s very close, so there is some amazement.
It is a feature of what is known as the large scale structure of the universe. In that context the use of the word structure is entirely appropriate since there is no ambiguity. The wording of the title feels odd because I don't recall individual parts of the large scale structure being referred to as structures, but my memory may be hazy since I have been out of the field for well over a decade.