Greetings from Palmia Observatory
Hope you all had a happy and noisy 4th of July celebration! For me, it seemed the GW event app on my iPhone was very noisy too, always chirping whenever a binary black hole merger was detected.
Here is one example of a detected binary black hole merger, GW250705cb, detected on July 5. The probability of a real merger was detected very high at 99%.
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| Binary Black Hole Merger event shows up on GW Event App (Source: Palmia Observatory) |
The GW Event App also provides a sky map location for the event. Now where optical fireworks also detected for this event? It is not known at this time, so we will have to wait and see if any follow up wok by other optical observatories reports any measurements. We also have to wait a bit to find out what are the relative masses of the black holes.
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| Sky Location of binary black hole merger using GW Event App (Source: Palmia Observatory) |
When this alarm notification went off on my iPhone, I mentioned to the group of people sitting nearby that a merger of binary black holes had just been detected. No one was especially excited about that evet, but knowing that I was a physicist wannabe, they asked how I had so much faith in the predictions of things that I could not see. Well, it's not a question of faith because we have evidence and lines of evidence that point to and are corroborated by events and measurements.
Later on, I wondered about the question whether we rely on "faith" that the sun will rise tomorrow? Hmm, maybe this is a good example where Bayesian statistics can be used. So, I just used as an example that I had experienced the sun to rise in the morning for say 10,000 times. What then is the Bayesian probability that the sun will rise tomorrow?
Well, rather than calculating the number myself, I just asked the question to Google AI and the response is pasted below. Wow, so the prediction based on past experience, not faith, is almost exactly 1, meaning near certainty.
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| Bayesian Prediction for Sun rising tomorrow (Source: Google AI search) |
Finally, while out taking Astronomer Assistant Ruby out for a walk, we bumped into our neighbor Ken, who we always enjoy talking a little physics and astronomy. I mentioned that one of my daydreams was to someday have a martini made of ice from the moon because he was one of the early scientists that predicted that ice might be stable on the Moon if not ever in direct sunlight. Craters near the Moon's south pole would be good possible locations. Here is the abstract from Ken's 1961 paper.
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| Abstract for article predicting possible presence of ice (Source: Ken Watson, et al, 1961) |
As we continued on our separate paths he said "Yeah, dream on!" Afterwards I thought an even more magnificent dream would be if he, Ken, could sip a martini made from ice brought back from the Moon.
When I told this story to another Ken, Gravity Guy Ken, he said the daydream could be even better if the ice on the moon also had some condensed molecules of interstellar material that contain organic molecules, like alcohol and citric acid. Wow, now that would indeed be a great cosmic martini daydream.
The next time I bump into Ken I will have to ask if the vapor pressure of ethyl alcohol such that it too could really be found in lunar ice?
Just for fun I looked up one of my first encounters with Ken while out walking the dogs was way back in 2019 as summarized in this blog post: http://www.palmiaobservatory.com/2019/08/moon-misses-jupiter-and-we-missed.html
Until next time,
Resident Astronomer George
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