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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

The article is quite clear that this one exhibits characteristics predicted, but not previously observed, and with some surprises.

> But Dr Anderson said finding something that turned on for a minute was really weird.

> Dr Hurley-Walker said the observations match a predicted astrophysical object called an ‘ultra-long period magnetar’.

> “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. “Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”

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this is not what astronomers or physicists think is mysterious. Just unexpected, and within the bounds of normal physical science.

Everybody who is complaining that the PR about the paper is clickbait is right. The PR is just clickbait. The paper is not.

If I saw a bright pink duck I would wonder how that duck came to be. If someone called it's origins mysterious I wouldn't write a string of angry HN posts about it, I don't think.

If I saw a bright pink duck I would expect that a neighbor's kid had painted the duck. Horses, not zebras, unless you're on the african savannah.

Did the kid paint the radio waves too?

In all seriousness, why is it brighter than expected? What's the expected brightness for such an object, and how many error bars is it away from this value?

See the text after Figure 4, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04272-x Since I am not an expert astronomer (just a helpful computational person who has worked in the field) I can't give you a detailed ELI5, but they talk a lot about how it looks different from existing examples, and how to find more examples of this type (so you can do surveys; modern astronomers don't like to study one-offs, as they are biased, and instead prefer to accumulate a larger sample of instances).

Your analogy is incorrect.

The existence of this megastar was falls under theoretically possible but never discovered.

Analogous would be an albino duck, existence inferred from albinos existing in every animal, but say an albino duck was not observed before.

Discovering bright pink duck would be akin to discovering something that our models cannot account for or explain.

Again, from the article.

That's interesting, and apparently unexpected.

I've seen pink flamingos so I think my existing model of "bird things" could accommodate a pink duck.

Flamingos are pink because they eat pink shrimp.

The difference is that pinkness in animals is specific to species and we have explanations for why they are pink. And we also have explanations for albinism, but it's not limited to specific species- it's found widely, across the complex life domain.

Find a pink duck? OK, the neighbor painted a duck. Find a population of pink ducks that reproduce and their children are all pink? OK, now we have an interesting situation.

Cool. Now:

Why is this magnetar brighter than expected, and how does it convert energy more efficiently?

Yes, that's the interesting scientific question. The PR person saw that and somehow got very excited! The reality is, this object will be placed in a database and people will probably follow it up, but not with high priority.

Astronomers have hundreds of years of experience in seeing things in the sky that couldn't be explained, and either were "entirely new thing we never saw before" (like pulsars) and even theorists suggesting looking for things that only got recognized once we knew what black holes were. This is common. I wouldn't describe it as mysterious, just unexpected.

I understand the problem of sensationalism but maybe you're downplaying this one too much? The object pulses at an unusual frequency that's never before been observed, that's something with high suprisal relative to what's known.

> We find that the source pulses every 18.18 min, an unusual periodicity that has, to our knowledge, not been observed previously.

The mysterious (as yet unexplained) aspect of it will require updating models's physics to account for its unusual emission properties. The lead researcher herself distinguished it from known types of objects and states "completely unexpected [object]...nobody thought would be able to produce this kind of emission".

I have no problem with the statement "completely unexpected that nobody thought would be able to produce this kind of emission".

Nothing is being downplayed; the history of astronomy is littered with events like this. If they get enough data and can explain it, astronomy will be updated slightly.

I'm unable to reply to your latest comment and must leave presently so I will reply here. I feel the perspective you've taken downplays things a bit.

The history of astronomy spans thousands of years, a high number of unusual observations will sure to have accumulated over time. But finding an unpredicted aspect of a previously unobserved class of objects is an exciting event carrying a relatively high amount of surprisal. The involved astronomers are clearly excited and being reserved with language is to be expected of formal papers. While not an astronomer, I find the resulting changes in observation patterns exciting to read about and look forward to learning about the unusual radiative properties of such magnetars.

Literally the last 200 hundred years of astronomy have been a series of "surprisal" that ended up being "part of the ouevre" 10 years later. Magnetars are a fairly niche area, as are neutron star in general.

Neutron stars are really surprising, actually, in the sense that their physics look like nothing we have on earth. We will probably be finding unexpected neutron stars and things like slow magnetars for quite some time.

> Yes, that's the interesting scientific question.

One might even say it's a mystery at the moment.

There is value to pop-sci's romantic relationship with new discoveries in science. I don't think it hurts anyone in the target demographic to enable their sense of curiosity and wonder. Clickbait is hardly a fair term, as this article hardly shares a floor with true clickbait like false death rumours, hate and fear mongering, and outright falsehoods.

Of all the replies to my comments, this is the best one I've seen. You're right that science reporting should instill wonder, it probably isn't that excessive to say it's mysterious or bizarre (my complaint is more the "we've never seen something like this so far" but let's not get into the semiotics of unsupervised clustering), and it's unfair to lump this in with Really Bad Clickbait.

I just have a strong aversion to the science->PR->news hype cycle and that's what happened here.

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