An example of metaphor and analogy used in public science discourse:
"Basic physics says that when you have a star, of that mass, and that radius, it's going to go in and out and pulsate on [a frequency of] 400 days, but after the mass was ejected it starts ringing with a much shorter period. In other words, it's not 400 days any more it's, oh, 200, 180, and it getting brighter and dimmer much faster than it ever has in over a century, and it is as if the star is trying to recover itself. The analogy that we have been using is that it's like when your washing machine goes out of balance, you know, and it starts not quite getting back into the normal behaviour."
Dr Andrea Dupree
Dr Andrea Dupree (Associate Director, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian) was (interviewed by Roland Pease on an episode of BBC's 'Science in Action')
(A suggestion that a star was trying to recover itself would be considered an anthropomorphism – but here that was only suggestee as a simile: 'as if')
The term ringing was not being used specifically because this was a programme for a non-specialist audience, as the work discussed was reported in a paper on a pre-print site
"…applied to Betelgeuse, this suggests that over
time, the post-outburst overtone ringing that we observe
may fade, or switch back to the fundamental mode"
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.09732
MacLeod, M., Antoni, A., Huang, C. D., Dupree, A., & Loeb, A.(2023) Left Ringing: Betelgeuse Illuminates the Connection Between Convective outbursts, Mode switching, and Mass Ejection in Red Supergiants
So, perhaps this is a 'dead metaphor' in the research community in this field.
Read examples of scientific analogies
