No one likes a Misleading Headline more than me and if you wrap it up in an alien life story, you’re sure to catch my attention. Scientist believe they’ve detected mysterious radio signal from alien planet blares the highly misleading although technically accurate headline.

The headline from Chron, and other sources to be fair, that’s just the one I clicked on, in no small way tries to entice the unwary clicker to a story about radio signals from an alien race residing on said alien planet. Nope, as you’ve probably already guessed by the fact this article is my weekly series of Misleading Headlines. The planet itself vibrates in such a way as to be detected from Earth based telescopes.

This is actually an interesting and important breakthrough in the search for exoplanets, that is planets not in our solar system. If the signal turns out to actually be an alien planet, that means we should be able to detect other such planets in the future. This is useful information to have and might well increase the number of such planets we can find by a considerable amount.

The story itself is fairly interesting but the intentionally misleading headline earns my disdain. Again, the headline is actually perfectly accurate. The radio signal does come from an alien planet or exoplanet. This is the kind of headline that is subtly misleading while the author of it can claim, in all dishonesty, hey, I wrote the truth, it’s not my fault you can’t interpret the words correctly.

It’s a headline designed to deceive someone into clicking the link and getting to the article. The main problem I have with an accurate but misleading headline of this nature is that many people don’t bother to actually read the story or even click on the link and thus misinformation can spread.

Interesting story, interesting astronomy, misleading headline.

Tom Liberman