Greetings from Palmia Observatory,
It's been a while and what better day to start off again like Pi Day. Also let's talk about black hole wind and matter falling into black holes and asking Grok to comment.
Many people have commented about Pi day and for me I just refer back to David's post from several years ago, that the whole day is just a conspiracy.
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| First of all, a joke about Pi Day (Source: David Naiditch) |
But really, it was nice to get down to the CSULB physics colloquium for a discussion on Gravitational Wave Astronomy.
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| CSULB Physics Colloquium with Jon Feitch - LIGO Laboratory - Cal Tech |
After the colloquium I tried to remember the equations that describe the emitted gravitational waves from the inspiral of two masses locked in for instance a binary system collapse. I remembered a book I purchased way back in November 2017 and thought to look up the answer there. That book, Gravitational Waves, by Michele Maggiore, comes in two volumes by Oxford press.
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| Purchased this book way back in Nov 2017 (Source: Palmia Observatory) |
So, I said why not give Grok a try at deriving the wave equation. Here is the final part of the summary where the solution is displayed in terms of the strain in spacetime. What do you make of this? I can't tell for sure, but it sort of looks right.
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| Grok answered the Gravitational Waves Derivation like this (Source: Palmia Observatory) |
If you want to read through the rest of the Grok conversation on the generation of gravitational waves from rotating masses, check it out here: https://x.com/i/grok/share/b0ed9520b7764094b5cc152c7ed89bb2
As if that was enough about black holes it turned out not to be the case because this month's OCA meeting was on the topic of black holes and their wind. I didn't attend the meeting in person but did sit in on it online.
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| Professor Lena Murchikova speaks at OCA meeting (Source: OC Astronomers) |
After the meeting I looked up some of Lena Murchikova's papers on finding the black hole wind. Check out this figure from the paper which shows the outlined wind from the black hole.
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| Description of Black Hole Wind (Source: Murchikova, et al, arxiv:2509.10615v2) |
I missed some of Lena's discussion on the history of the wind concept and so just did a google search to get a little background information:
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| Google search regarding black hole wind (Source: Palmia Observatory) |
For more of the details, be sure to check out Lena'a paper. In the meantime, I was intrigued by one of her slides, where she mentioned the matter infalling into a black hole and how much of the matter does not disappear behind the event horizon, but instead is just radiated away. In her example, 39% of the mass is just radiated away.
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| This amount of energy radiated by infalling matter (Source: L Murchikova at OCA meeting) |
So how does this work? I sort of remembered that it depends on such things as the incoming velocity and whether the black hole is spinning or not, but i couldn't remember the details, or the equations for that matter. Here is just a Google search on the topic:
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| Google search for amount of infalling matter converted to radiation (Source: Palmia Observatory) |
So, again, I decided to try Grok and see how it might answer these questions:
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| Grok conversation regarding infalling matter and radiation (Source: Palmia Observatory) |
Finally, if you want the rest of the Grok conversation on radiation from matter infalling onto black holes check it out here: https://x.com/i/grok/share/f311ae5752a64f7e87030289f2606eda
So what are we to make of all of this? I'm having a hard time generating enough energy or interest to pursue it much deeper. Maybe some readers will have some comments and inspiration.
Until next time,
Resident Astronomer George
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