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Where did you get this 1000x stellar mass figure from? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_observations https://en.wikipedia.o
by stromgo 9y ago
Where did you get this 1000x stellar mass figure from? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_observations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_obs... so far the observed merger components were between 7.5 and 35.4 solar masses.
The sample of stars in the night sky is biased by luminosity and longevity. I'd be curious to see a distribution of stellar masses that compensates for these two biases. On such a chart, extrapolating the trend in the high-mass range just before the error bars become too large would tell us whether 30-solar-mass stellar remnants are expected or unexpected by observation data.
- kobeya 9y agoThose are solar mass. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-mass_black_hole https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-mass_black_hole
- stromgo 9y agoI mean, where did you get this 1000x figure as what "we're finding a lot of"?
- kobeya 9y agoThere's examples in the article I linked to. (FWIW finding any at all, let alone the half dozen or so found in the last few years is "a lot" given the minuscule priors involved.)
- stromgo 9y agoI'm sorry I still don't see it. Your linked article says at the very top "There is as yet no unambiguous detection of an IMBH". Concerning gravitational waves, reference [7] says "We show that space based detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna are likely to detect several of these sources". Reference [8] says "gravitational-wave observations could be used to accurately measure masses of black holes in merging binaries and probe the existence of intermediate-mass black holes". So no discovery yet, just theoretical work on what the signal would look like.