So I came across this article today: SPACE.com -- Invisible Matter Won't Disappear Anytime Soon. I recently blogged about dark matter at some length, and I suppose this is follow-up.
The basic result is that one theory of dark matter, that dark matter is composed of as yet undiscovered particles called axions, indicates that dark matter may decay. If it decays, it is predicted, according to the theory of axions which remain undiscovered, to release X-rays that we could in principle observe. So it wouldn't be so dark. Given that the dark matter is separated out in the Bullet Cluster and we have deep X-ray observations, we can put a limit on the decay of the hypothetical axion particles, because we basically don't see any indication on it happening. That limit suggests that if it does happen, it won't happen very fast and the dark matter will persist for a very long time. If it's axions. And if the ideas about how axions might decay resemble the truth.
OK, so now let me rant. It isn't the fault of the researchers that I will rant; doing this calculation and comparing it to observations is fine. And it isn't the fault of editors or referees that I approach my rant. There's a process that decides what is worth archiving in the literature, the notebook of human science if you will, and I'd rather put more in there than less. And some might wonder how the axion hypothesis stacks up against observations of the Bullet Cluster.
It's the whole process of popularizing science I'm going to rant about. I've had my research covered in the popular news, in newspaper articles and even television. And I've written or helped write twice as many press releases.
The popular news journalists and editors are rarely trained in science, and even when they are, rarely trained in the subfields they must write about. On the plus side, if they understand the story, so can a general readership. On the negative side, it's usually just a mess.
I remember the first time I was deeply irked about this was when planets around pulsars were first discovered, back in the early 1990s when I was in grad school. It was a 10 second blurb on CNN that said something like, "A planet has been discovered orbiting a star a thousand light years away. No word on whether or not there's life."
So, those probably are the relevant bits a general reader would want to know, but I was floored. I was a budding young astronomer and I couldn't make sense of the two sentence "story." And being around a pulsar, no way was this planet anything like Earth, but I didn't even know the distant star was a pulsar. It wasn't enough information to even assimilate in a sensible fashion, and it should have been. A third sentence would have been great! Why does news, especially on TV, have to be a sound bite? Are we really dumbed down that much? Is such a very small segment of the population the only audience for anything with detail or thought?
I don't believe so. I hope not.
But just to wrap up my thoughts about the dark matter decay story...the science article itself isn't bad. I could follow it, and understand the result. And I could also understand (and I'll let my bias as an experimentalist show) why this is not of very much interest. Nothing was detected about a particle that might not even exist. There are other candidates for dark matter out there, and it might well turn out to be something we haven't theorized yet. I don't consider the result here a serious result about dark matter decay. I consider it an experiment to detect some tiny amount of light from dark matter that didn't pan out. Slap a few fancy words on the story and it's a lead article at space.com.
OK, maybe it's a slow news day and I shouldn't complain about astronomy getting covered, but I think we should demand high standards both in the choice of science covered and how it's covered. I'll give space.com props for often doing a very good job, but sometimes I just have to rant.