> As Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” Actually he probably didn’t say that—but everyone keeps saying he did, illustrating the point perfectly.

Well played.

The title is... odd.

White dwarfs and neutron stars are generally considered "dead stars", since they no longer have active fusion processes. But they do radiate from energy left over from the star's "death". (Mostly thermal energy for a white dwarf, for neutron stars there is also a lot in angular momentum and the spinning magnetic field.) In theory, they will eventually radiate all of their energy away and become black dwarfs or cold neutron stars, but IIRC, that would take longer than the current lifetime of the universe.

Should it be a big embarrassment for Phys. Rev. Lett., a big dip in their reputation?

The whole point of respectable journals is that they filter out bad quality papers.

lol, I wrote a very similar comment here a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964524

It's true, that paper is nonsense. There's not really much else to say. Preprint servers sometimes publish the sort of stuff that wouldn't pass peer review. (Remember that S.Korean "superconductor" from about two years ago!?) The press should be cautious when writing about it.

There's an issue this highlights and it's not that the original authors were stupid so much as there's clearly a lot of knowledge held in silos.

That's not a good thing if your goal is to advance everyone's knowledge. Whatever is going on in academia is failing relatively closely related fields which is not good.