Thursdays are low-research days! But I did have a great conversation with Bonaca (Harvard) about the paper we are writing on the GD-1 stellar stream. We talked about the discussion section: What can we say about black-hole models for the gravitational perturbation we observe? What can we say about the population of perturbers from this one perturbing event?
At the end of the day, Will Farr (Flatiron) gave the Departmental Colloquium about gravitational-wave events, with a focus on statistical inference issues. He made some nice points, including that if Advanced LIGO works according to plans, it will generate enough black-hole and neutron-star inspiral events to solve a bunch of cosmological questions, like the Hubble Constant, whether there are pair-instability supernovae and at what masses, and how black-hole binaries form. That is, it will be routine, high-throughput astronomy! Farr is one of the people responsible for the excellent statistical inference underlying the LIGO results.
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