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The title is bad, but... > Chris Belczynski, an astrophysicist at Warsaw University, previously felt so sure that such a large specimen wouldn’t be seen that i
by cgriswald 6y ago
The title is bad, but...
> Chris Belczynski, an astrophysicist at Warsaw University, previously felt so sure that such a large specimen wouldn’t be seen that in 2017 he placed a bet with colleagues. “I think we are about to lose the bet,” Belczynski said, “and for the good of science!”
LIGO has existed for decades and by 2017 had already detected a merger. My guess is he considered black holes in this range rare enough that we were unlikely to detect any. If he believed they were impossible the article certainly doesn’t elucidate on that fact.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 3JPLW 6y agoThis was a key feature of the bet. It's within the first 100 gravitational wave detections. They're betting against an unknown distribution. Neither side was saying that they wouldn't be found.
- gizmo686 6y agoIs there a sampling bias involved? I presume that different masses of black holes result in different frequency waves, and that LIGO is not uniformly sensitive to all frequencies. Depending on the actual numbers, this would make these intermediate sized mergers either over or under represented in our data.