Month: September 2022

REDUCTIONISM HAS FAILED. “Zen is holism, carried to its logical extreme. If holism claims that things can only be understood as wholes, not as sums of their parts, Zen goes one further, in maintaining that the world cannot be broken into parts at all. To divide the world into parts is to be deluded, and to miss enlightenment.” https://lnkd.in/dmfn9qW View in LinkedIn

This image includes the most distant galaxies and protogalaxies we ever have seen. The largest galaxies in the image are as close as 6 billion light years, while the smallest dots are protogalaxies as far away as 30 billion light years. This image thus spans the edge of our affectable universe, with most of the places it shows being forever beyond our reach. https://lnkd.in/dHhggEG View in LinkedIn

DISTRIBUTION. “Most low-mass black holes (∼10 M⊙) typically reside within massive galaxies (M⋆ ≃ 10(11)  M⊙) while massive black holes (∼50 M⊙) typically reside within dwarf galaxies (M⋆ ≃ 10(9)  M⊙) today.” (M⊙ = solar mass ~equivalent to mass of the sun). https://lnkd.in/d8Jh7TB View in LinkedIn

IMMINENT MERGER RATE. “If roughly 1 per cent of black holes are involved in a binary black hole merger, then the reported merger rate densities from advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory can be accommodated for a range of merger time-scales, and the detection of mergers with >50 M⊙ black holes should be expected within the next decade.” (M⊙ = solar mass ~equivalent to mass of the sun). https://lnkd.in/d8Jh7TB View in LinkedIn

THE HOPE. “As more mergers are detected, the prospect of identifying the host galaxy population, either directly through the detection of electromagnetic counterparts of binary neutron star mergers or indirectly through the anisotropy of the events, will become a realistic possibility.” https://lnkd.in/d8Jh7TB View in LinkedIn

ORIGINS. “As the field now pivots from gravitational wave discovery to gravitational wave astronomy, there are a number of questions we hope to explore in more detail. One basic question is the origin of these massive black holes. Heavy (≳30  M⊙) black holes are expected to exist as the result of stellar evolution, and have been predicted to dominate the LIGO signal.” (M⊙ = solar mass ~equivalent to mass of the sun; LIGO = The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). https://lnkd.in/d8Jh7TB View in LinkedIn

STRATEGY. “In this work, we outline a simple way to compute the BBH merger rate for stellar remnant black holes that allows one to assess the uncertainties in the various required ingredients in a transparent manner.” (BBH = binary black hole). https://lnkd.in/d8Jh7TB View in LinkedIn

THE START. “The key idea is that we have a good empirical understanding of the overall galaxy number density, stellar ages and metallicities as a function of galaxy mass, and estimates of the initial mass function of stars that formed in these galaxies.” https://lnkd.in/d8Jh7TB View in LinkedIn

GEOMETRY IN NATURE. “But the formative faculty of the earth does not take to her heart only one shape; she knows and is practiced in the whole of geometry. I have seen… a panel inlaid with silver ore; from it, a dodecahedron, like a small hazelnut in size, projected to half its depth, as if in flower.” (Johannes Kepler, 1610, The Six-Cornered Snowflake) https://lnkd.in/duxTaRF View in LinkedIn