Posted on 11/04/2020 4:16:36 PM PST by MtnClimber
Explanation: Over fifty gravitational wave events have now been detected. These events mark the distant, violent collisions of two black holes, a black hole and a neutron star, or two neutron stars. Most of the 50 events were detected in 2019 by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors in the USA and the VIRGO detector in Europe. In the featured illustration summarizing the masses of the first 50 events, blue dots indicate higher-mass black holes while orange dots denote lower-mass neutron stars. Astrophysicists are currently uncertain, though, about the nature of events marked in white involving masses that appear to be in the middle -- between two and five solar masses. The night sky in optical light is dominated by nearby and bright planets and stars that have been known since the dawn of humanity. In contrast, the sky in gravitational waves is dominated by distant and dark black holes that have only been known about for less than five years. This contrast is enlightening -- understanding the gravitational wave sky is already reshaping humanity's knowledge not only of star birth and death across the universe, but properties of the universe itself.
Pinging the APOD list.
...dog is currently uncertain...
Wow, you found it and I did not even post a hint!
I think that’s two bars of a Eddie Van Halen song.
Candelabra!!!
The Phantom of the Opera is there.....
Inside your mind.
Wait. The last authoritative data I saw from our illustrious physics community was that gravity doesn’t actually exist. But completely undetectable dark matter does exist.
Fifty instances of scientific fraud detected.
That’s certainly a useless chart. There are no units on the vertical axis, and not even an axis on the horizontal. It looks to me like a fisherman who laid his fish hooks out on a black mat.
One might assume the vertical units are solar mass, that the scale is logarithmic. and that the x axis is simply an arbitrary place to put the fish hooks, but what do the vertical separation, horizontal separation, and the three ball hooks signify?
You covered my issues with it. The text spends almost no time describing what the graphic means.
a couple of examples / sidebars:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3806559/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3858606/posts
1. Yes, there are units on the vertical axis
2. There is no horizontal axis
Q: why no mergers over 80 solar masses detected?
- presumably the detection drops off as the masses get smaller. But why no larger mergers!
Looks like my Chanukah menorah when it is full of candles. Or it’s God’s version of Beethoven’s “Fifth” musical notes.
There are numbers on the vertical axis, not units. The units have to be inferred from the title - That’s a no-no in a good graph.
Your point on lack of detection of mergers over 80 solar masses is interesting. There either haven’t been any, or maybe they can’t be detected with the measurements. I suspect the latter, though it’s certainly not intuitive. One would think that the larger the merger, the greater the likelihood of detection. On the other hand, though, with the size of the universe as it is, one would also think that the presence of gravitational waves would be quite ‘noisy’. Maybe we’re missing something in the measurements.
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