Thog's Science Masterclass #25

[realthog]

Into my mailbox this morning pops my weekly delivery of eSkeptic, the sampler from the magazine The Skeptic, journal of the Skeptics Society. And the first thing I see is a very pretty picture of a galaxy, with this caption:

Below: The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy (discovered in 2003) is the nearest known galaxy to the centre of the Milky Way. Found in the constellation after which it is named, it is about 25,000 light years from the sun and 42,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way. It is also the home of the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius A.

Clearly someone at eSkeptic has written the caption based on an original supplied by the Strasbourg Observatory (whose pic this is), and clearly that original correctly identified the constellation Canis Major as the "home of" the star Sirius (or, for the pedantic, Sirius A). The difference is a bit crucial: Sirius is about 11 light years away while the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is, as stated, about 25,000 light years away. In other words, although the two objects lie in roughly the same region of the sky as seen from here, one is a nearby star and the other is outside our galaxy.

Just a matter of clumsy editing (or possibly translation), one might think. Well, yes . . . and no. The howler betrays a quite astonishing ignorance of basic astronomy -- quite astonishing, certainly, for a society of supposed rationalists, whose staffers are surely expected to have at least a smattering of the sciences. (Or just of plain logic: is it likely the galaxy containing the brightest star in our night sky could have somehow gone unnoticed until 2003?) And if putative professionals at The Skeptic can commit scientific howlers like this, what of the state of scientific knowledge among the public at large?[*]

[* If you'd like to know more about the scientific knowledge and attitudes toward science of the public at large, there's an interesting hot-off-the-presses report here. First, though, depress yourself by completing the quiz here (it takes only a minute) and, once done, looking at the results for all participants. Either you're a genius or 'most everyone else is woefully ignorant; you choose.]