Why Do So Many Astronomy Discoveries Fail To Live up To the Hype? 22/01/2021
An image of Venus taken by the Akatsuki Ultraviolent Imager. Photo: DARTS archive + Meli thev/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Britons who switched on their TVs to “Good Morning Britain” on the morning of September 15, 2020, were greeted by news not from our own troubled world, but from neighbouring Venus. Piers Morgan, one of the hosts, was talking about a major science story that had surfaced the previous day, informing his viewers that “there may be some form of life on Venus.”
Astronomers, he reported, were considering that “living organisms may be floating around in the clouds of planet Venus.” He was then joined, via live TV link-up, by Sheila Kanani, a planetary scientist and outreach officer with the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). Morgan put it to her point-blank: “Is there life on Venus?” Kanani replied diplomatically but enthusiastically: “We can’t definitively