In the Dark

Yesterday came across the above “infographic” – as I’m told such things are called – showing the media traffic generated by last month’s Early Release Observations from the ESA Euclid mission. Some quite interesting facts emerge from it. The new observations were released n 7th November, hence the big spike in the left hand panel on that date.

I see that about 31% of the activity was on Twitter, which I am no longer on, with a slightly smaller amount on Facebook. Overall, social media account for about 60% of the “reach”, with mainstream media (including print, online, and TV/Radio) languishing far behind. Blogs (presumably including this one) account for a mere 1%.

The breakdown by country is interesting too; the table shows only EAS member states. The UK is way out in front, no doubt because BBC News ran a major item on the day of the release. France, Germany, Italy and Spain all have major scientific involvements in Euclid and correspondingly active public engagement activities.

I was pleasantly surprised at the significant amount of interest in Ireland, given that some bigger countries with far greater scientific involvement in Euclid (e.g. Denmark and The Netherlands) generated so little. As the only member of the Euclid Consortium in Ireland I could try to pretend that this was all down to me, but I rather think it’s more likely to be a result of the fact that many Irish people read the UK media so some of the Irish traffic could be spillover from the big UK spike. Still, I think one can interpret this as meaning that the Public in the Republic have an appetite for news about space, something that we have certainly noticed when organizing events in Maynooth.

I thought I’d mention another nice thing. Here is one of the PR images produced by ESA about the early release observations. The point about Euclid is that to achieve its science goals it has to have extremely good optical quality across a very wide field of view. The systems are currently being tested and fine-tuned to see how good their performance actually is, but so far it’s looking good.

The main thing that caught my eye, however, is the collection of little flags along the bottom. How nice it is to see Ireland’s among them!

This entry was posted on December 3, 2023 at 11:13 am and is filed under Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmology, Early Release Observations, ESA, Euclid, European Space Agency, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.