A New Chapter in the Life Story of Planets?
Sky and Telescope, March 2005

I thought that this article was relevant as this week in lectures we looked at how planets form, however once I read the article I found that it didn’t tell me very much.

However, I think this was because of the nature of the journal the article was sourced from. Being an astronomy magazine, the audience usually consists of professional astronomers or people with a keen interest in astronomy that already know quite a bit about the topic. Because of this the information given is at a higher level than, for example, an article in a daily newspaper. The author assumes that the reader already know the meanings of the various terms that are used, for example, what a Spitzer survey is. As I don’t have that basic understanding I found this article difficult to understand and had to read it several times before I could discern what it was about. (For example, I don’t know what the Kuiper Belt is or what Rosetta stones are.)

Apart from the fact that I found it confusing, I didn’t think that this was a very good piece of journalism. The magazine is presenting the results of some research done by a team of astronomers, but they don’t derive any solid conclusions from the results, or give the reader a good idea of the significance of the discovery.

The writer of the article does not make it clear what the aim of the research is or why it is important. The article also seems to lack a solid conclusion, except to say that the results are inconclusive if more images are found in the future astronomers may be able to prove a theory, leaving the reader thinking: “So what was the point of that?”

The article failed to impress upon me the significance of the research. It didn’t stimulate any interest in the topic and I felt no desire to research it any further. I am sure however that more experienced astronomers would find this article more interesting than I did.

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