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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

Link to actual paper with actual images: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acba86

I get incredibly frustrated with popular science articles that use only artist’s impressions and avoid the real images.

To me, the real images are much more exciting. You don’t need fake clarity and fake colour when you’re seeing a (candidate) high speed black hole sucking the life out of some fricking ginormous balls of flaming nuclear fusion.

This article is even worse, that it shows an illustration without a caption identifying it as an illustration, which is very misleading. (Later they show it again with the caption saying it's an illustration.)

In their defense, NASA did use the same artistic rendition...

NASA used that image, but the first words under it were "this is an artist's impression of..." which is the right way to label things if you don't want people mistaking an illustration for real data.

Saying that a journalist used a PR image is not a defense.

The figures in the primary literature are great for scientists and reasonably educated adults, but they're trying to capture the imaginations of children and those not so scientifically literate.

It's understandable. If you show the actual figures to a layman, many of them would respond in disbelief or disappointment. You have to build a bridge, and that begins with illustration. It's a communication and education tool.

Then use both. Many science 'educators' do a terrible job of dumbing things down so much that kids who want to pursue their interest farther get filtered when they hit the scholarly literature unless they are lucky enough to have imaginative teachers.

> Then use both. Many science 'educators' do a terrible job of dumbing things down so much that kids who want to pursue their interest farther get filtered when they hit the scholarly literature unless they are lucky enough to have imaginative teachers.

Exactly… I never understood the point of making science more accessible to the masses, if the compromise was making the actual science inaccessible to the inquiring mind. There’s no reason there can’t be a simple abstract followed by the actual science and associated images / maths.

I disagree. By only showing the artist’s impression they give a false sense of what our scientific capabilities are. The images are amazing but they’re also rather poor in the mind of a child who only ever sees artist’s impressions and 4K HDR Marvel movies of things hurtling through space.

This means that the aren’t being exposed to reality and how we can use such noisy low resolution images to make important discoveries. They are lead to believe that there is no advancement that they can potentially follow a career to achieve. The work is done and they shouldn’t aspire to make science better.

The JWST has been an excellent example of what can be achieved by showing the damn images.

Agreed, especially for the headline image of “captured an image of” articles. Artists’ impressions are fine but don’t sell them click bait style as genuine.

And the NASA press release:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/hubble-sees-possib...

Not sure what the deal is with this hubblesite.org…

Edit: Ah ok, interesting… It’s entirely legit. The “about us” page says the website is produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (https://www.stsci.edu).

Absolutely incredible.

Yeah, STScI is very legitimate (I work there as an astronomer) and it has an excellent Office of Public Outreach team.

The graphic does specify that it is an illustration, but I agree that it could explicitly mention that it's an artist's rendition of the (authors' physical interpretation) of the astronomical observations.

Here's the Storytell report summarizing the actual paper: https://app.storytell.ai/mdx/report/8E3KPJBxbGyjfzYVxjqFCT?e...

Incredibly cool. That is an absolutely massive structure, twice the length our Milky Way is across. Those images are like no astronomy images I've ever seen.

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