Recent comments in /f/science

kittenTakeover t1_je9yx85 wrote

Reply to comment by QristopherQuixote in Automated enforcement of water conservation rules in Fresno, California led to a decrease in summer water use and violations of conservation rules (relative to households subject to in-person inspections). This program massively increased consumer complaints, ultimately causing its cancellation. by smurfyjenkins

The thing is that nobody wants full enforcement. The public doesn't want full enforcement of many laws because it would be a nuisance and most people break certain laws regularly. The law enforcement doesn't want full enforcement because partial enforcement allows them to continue their racket without public backlash shutting it down.

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Andromeda321 OP t1_je9wwr9 wrote

Reply to comment by AbouBenAdhem in Gaia discovers a new family of black holes: astronomers studied the orbits of stars and noticed that some of them wobbled on the sky, as if they were gravitationally influenced by massive objects. No light could be found using several telescopes, leaving only one possibility: black holes. by Andromeda321

  1. Not common at all, that's why it's literally only happened two times. Happens much more commonly when searching for exoplanets however.

  2. It does! It implies the rate of black holes is much higher than previously thought!

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DoodlerDude t1_je9wnsg wrote

Reply to comment by pablorepe in You might like paintings more if you stop to read the gallery labels - people high in openness, and those with limited art experience, liked paintings more after reading information about the artist and their technique. by Litvi

Nah, adding some historical context can really add to the enjoyment of an artwork.

Personally the more I learn about the impressionists, the more I enjoy their paintings.

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AbouBenAdhem t1_je9vp5e wrote

Reply to comment by Andromeda321 in Gaia discovers a new family of black holes: astronomers studied the orbits of stars and noticed that some of them wobbled on the sky, as if they were gravitationally influenced by massive objects. No light could be found using several telescopes, leaving only one possibility: black holes. by Andromeda321

  • How common is it to have enough observations of a star to be able to detect this kind of wobble in its orbit?

  • Does this affect our estimate for the overall prevalence of black holes, if the first one discovered by this method isn’t emitting the x-rays we’ve used to find the other currently-known ones?

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Vakulum t1_je9vl3h wrote

Reply to You might like paintings more if you stop to read the gallery labels - people high in openness, and those with limited art experience, liked paintings more after reading information about the artist and their technique. by Litvi

Idk. I'm too stupid for art. I get bored in an art museum quickly. Total opposite of I book a guided tour or get a well made audio guide. I just need the context to a painting and done guidance to really appreciate them.

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More-Grocery-1858 t1_je9vaij wrote

Reply to You might like paintings more if you stop to read the gallery labels - people high in openness, and those with limited art experience, liked paintings more after reading information about the artist and their technique. by Litvi

Art needs some kind of meaning for us to like it. Sometimes it's not about knowing the technique and the meaning emerges from elsewhere. For example:

  • It's an image of a character, location, or story you already know about.
  • It matches an aesthetic you're familiar with.
  • It's a collector's item and will grow in value.
  • It's a souvenir of a place you've been.

The deeper that art penetrates our personal web of experience, the deeper the meaning we feel. 'Good' art often serves as conceptual glue, holding a number of ideas in a single expression of an image. But humans and art are both open containers and anything can go inside, which is why the term 'art' can be hard to define and highly personal.

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marketrent t1_je9uvjq wrote

Reply to comment by Andromeda321 in Gaia discovers a new family of black holes: astronomers studied the orbits of stars and noticed that some of them wobbled on the sky, as if they were gravitationally influenced by massive objects. No light could be found using several telescopes, leaving only one possibility: black holes. by Andromeda321

Congratulations on this exciting discovery, and thank you for sharing!

How did MeerKAT admin respond when they heard about what you observed?

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Carbon140 t1_je9tz24 wrote

Reply to comment by AskMoreQuestionsOk in The advantages of living in cities for children and adolescents’ healthy growth and development are shrinking across much of the world, according to new study. by chrisdh79

This is a global study, it's including poverty stricken farmers in africa/india/Indonesia etc. This trend was seen in "all but a few wealthy countries", so if you grew up in a wealthy country that provides decent access to schooling/nutrition etc for its more rural population then more than likely what you suggest is true.

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Squirrel851 t1_je9so1r wrote

Reply to comment by mikk0384 in Automated enforcement of water conservation rules in Fresno, California led to a decrease in summer water use and violations of conservation rules (relative to households subject to in-person inspections). This program massively increased consumer complaints, ultimately causing its cancellation. by smurfyjenkins

They won't pursue someone else. They have bigger issues to deal with. It's either your ticket or it's not. But they send it to whoever is on file. Most of the time on the interstate cameras they are too far away to get a driver picture. So if you fight it, chances are you're going to win.

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Just-a-Mandrew t1_je9pvm1 wrote

Reply to You might like paintings more if you stop to read the gallery labels - people high in openness, and those with limited art experience, liked paintings more after reading information about the artist and their technique. by Litvi

Is art good if it needs an explanation? Is this type of art a visual form? In my personal opinion, I think the best art is the one that is communicated well. Not necessarily instantly, maybe it takes a bit of exploration, but if I have to read an explanation of it, I feel like it fails as a visual medium. You shouldn’t have to read an essay about a piece of music in order to know it moves you.

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Andromeda321 OP t1_je9p2rd wrote

Reply to Gaia discovers a new family of black holes: astronomers studied the orbits of stars and noticed that some of them wobbled on the sky, as if they were gravitationally influenced by massive objects. No light could be found using several telescopes, leaving only one possibility: black holes. by Andromeda321

Astronomer here- I’m actually the 3rd author on this paper, and am quoted in this press release! It means I helped discover the second closest black hole to Earth, just 3800 light years from us! Paper available here

Now first thing to clarify is, this is truly the lead author's discovery (Kareem El-Badry), who is an amazing astronomer. What he's been doing is going into the Gaia catalog (which carefully tracks the precise movement of billions of sources) and being great at finding "needle in a haystack" type things. In this case, the thing was a red giant star, about the same mass as our sun, orbiting an unseen companion that we've concluded must be a black hole, named Gaia BH2.

How do you do this? Well as you might recall, orbital mechanics state that if you have two objects in space gravitationally bound, they will orbit a common point of interest. When this happens, you'll see the objects "wobble" in their movement back and forth over the course of their mutual orbit (which is how we find many exoplanets, in fact!) What Kareem did, strictly speaking, was find a star with a weird "wobble" in the data... and that "wobble" indicated the star's orbit was in a period of P= 1277 days, and the companion it was orbiting would be a compact object ~9x the mass of the sun.

Now, a star 9x the mass of the sun would be stupid bright, and very obvious bc this visible star is pretty bright on its own (12th magnitude). Definitely nothing there in follow-up observations, so it's not a star. So basically at this point, the argument is "if only we knew of something that was very massive, so massive light doesn't escape it... oh yeah, a black hole!"

Now the trick is some black holes do emit at low levels, thanks to accreting dust onto them- this happens in closer star- black hole pairs, called X-ray binaries. This emission is basically created as particles get close to the event horizon of the black hole, "feeding" it, and how we can spot them usually in radio and X-rays. And, well, we know this star pretty well because we can see it, and every star will have some amount of particles coming off of it in a stellar wind (like the sun does, and how we get the aurora), which is pretty well understood for stars of this type. So then the question is- is Gaia BH2 emitting at any wavelength?

Now this is where I come in, in my role of someone who knows a thing or two about how to get radio observations of weird black holes. :) Kareem is in my institute and came in to tell me about this object a few months ago, and that he'd discovered the closest period in its ~3.5 year orbit was happening this past month! (Yes, that's a bit of luck- in science it's good to be lucky sometimes!) So if you want to detect particles interacting with the black hole, your best chance of seeing it is basically now. Also, it was a very southern hemisphere object, so not just any telescope can look at it.

So, what I did was file for emergency time to use the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, the best telescope on Earth to do this observation, asking for a several-hour observation of Gaia BH2. Luckily, they agreed and granted the time, so we took a look a few weeks ago! (And I have now officially hung up my shingle as a "black hole consultant" btw- my rates are very reasonable! :) )

Now, the bad news is, we did not detect any radio emission from Gaia BH2 (nor did the Chandra X-ray telescope.) You can see the details in Figure 10 of the paper linked at top. But the good news is this is actually massively helpful, because there is so much we don't understand about black holes! For example, how does this accretion process work for emission from black holes? Our data is good enough that we can say most of those stellar wind particles never reach the event horizon- maybe there are strong winds blowing them away, or similar. Not as exciting as a detection, but still really useful!

Anyway, moving on from that, Gaia BH2 is exciting because as the name implies, it's the second such Gaia black hole- the first being Gaia BH1. This discovery happened a few months ago (press release if you missed it then), and that one happens to be the closest black hole to Earth that we know of (and why Gaia BH2 is second- this one has the largest orbit known for a black hole though). This is super exciting because it now implies that these black holes in orbits are actually rather common in space- more common than ones where the black hole and star are closer at this rate!- and the trouble is detecting them. (It's also not clear how they form, so some nice work for theorists to do.) Well, for now- the good news is Gaia is still taking data, and its next data release (in ~2025) will have a lot more of these stars with mystery black hole companions in it! So, guess there will be a lot more to do!

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AutoModerator t1_je9oh2s wrote

Reply to Gaia discovers a new family of black holes: astronomers studied the orbits of stars and noticed that some of them wobbled on the sky, as if they were gravitationally influenced by massive objects. No light could be found using several telescopes, leaving only one possibility: black holes. by Andromeda321

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mikk0384 t1_je9mggp wrote

Reply to comment by Squirrel851 in Automated enforcement of water conservation rules in Fresno, California led to a decrease in summer water use and violations of conservation rules (relative to households subject to in-person inspections). This program massively increased consumer complaints, ultimately causing its cancellation. by smurfyjenkins

>Otherwise every Karen and Keith would be giving tickets to whoever they wanted.

Nobody would accept them, and the judges can determine that it isn't theirs from the photo anyway. That's a pointless argument.

If you lend your car to someone and get a photo with the driver visible, it should be easy to get it moving. Chances are that you can even get a new photo of the person to verify your claim that it is them - you wouldn't lend your car to just anyone.

If someone speeds in someone else's car, I'd count that as a betrayal of trust. I wouldn't have any issues whatsoever giving them the ticket they earned for themselves. That I had to give it to them is just a result of me trusting someone I shouldn't have.

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katarh t1_je9lyhq wrote

Reply to comment by pablorepe in You might like paintings more if you stop to read the gallery labels - people high in openness, and those with limited art experience, liked paintings more after reading information about the artist and their technique. by Litvi

Sometimes the little placards provide a lot more context than the raw painting could ever provide.

If it's a portrait, who is the subject? Is there some symbolic meaning behind the objects around them? Who commissioned it, and why? Was the artist just starting out, or was this the highlight of their career?

If it's a landscape, where was it painted? Was it done "in plain air" on site, or was it done from a sketch in a studio? Did the artist live there, or were they just visiting?

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