Notices by erl (erl@chaosfem.tw), page 2

got a good ant photo last night

need to clean my dusty mirror but trying out an outfit for a thing

hey yall, here's a #science thread!

One of the larger excitements of my past couple months is finally getting this paper out -- it's up on arXiv tonight and accepted to ApJL (with an AAS Nova highlight on the way)

This paper is trying to answer the question of how many really big black holes are in our corner of the universe and the consequence of that number.

We think that our work substantially refines the census of black holes more than about a billion times the mass of the sun, which places constraints on the evolution of massive galaxies over the past couple billion years and furthers our understanding of the cosmic gravitational wave background

In this thread I'll tell ya how we did it! Let's dive in!

Read the paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14595

1/8

#science #astronomy #astrophysics #astro

An important discovery in the past quarter century or so of extragalactic astronomy is the existence of scaling relations which very simply relate different properties of those galaxies.

One of the most intriguing relations connects the total stellar mass of a galaxy to the mass of its black hole. Virtually every evolved galaxy in the sky has a supermassive black hole in its center, and the mass of each of those black holes is about 0.2% the mass of the stars in its galaxy.

At first glance, this relation is pretty simple -- big galaxies have big black holes. But more profoundly this relation suggests that supermassive black holes co-evolve with the galaxies they live in.

This winds up begin a really useful tool: If you know the mass of all the stars in a galaxy, you can reasonably estimate the mass of its black hole! So if we want to build a census of black holes, we can start out with a census of galaxy stellar masses!

2/8

It’s still ungodly warm out so I guess it’s yet another sundress day

yes, we do seem to be well on our way to a fascist hellhole, but also I just remembered that I have some leftover Code Red in my fridge so like idk its hard to tell if its a good day or a bad day

Slow day at work selfie

@powersoffour yeah there are a lot of them around here but *somehow* I haven’t had to interact with them as other street-users while cycling before.

Honestly I think one of my gripes is that if I were seriously wounded while cycling I’d at least want it to be from something beautiful. But like can you imagine needing to explain how you broke your leg and the answer is “well, hit by a cybertruck”

First time encountering cybertrucks while cycling, but encountered 3 on my little 15min bike commute today.

One of the most important bits of cycling safety on car-heavy streets is communication with other drivers — seeing whether they’ve seen you and whether they’re waving you by etc. idk if it’s the angle of the windshield or a tint or what but for each of the 3 ct’s that I encountered there was literally no visibility of the driver whatsoever. So no way to know if they saw me before I cross their path or to know their intentions, and just a lot of hoping that they don’t do something stupid with a block of metal that would seriously injure anyone it crosses.

#BikeTooter

10 year timeline, June 19 2014-2024; on estrogen 38% of the time

Gotta love those walkable small town downtowns

As a recovered hipster I’m now of the firm belief that you can only do something ironically twice before it’s just a thing you do and I’ve said rizz in two toots today so I’m walking on thin ice

Day 4 selfie! (omg so ready to be done with traveling for a bit)

AASelfie

Kind of great when you get to the other side of a wave of dysmorphia and realize that you actually might be kinda cute

Sept 2019 to this morning; #throwbackthursday #trans

Why don’t dentists give toys anymore? When I was six I had so many slinkies so idk how they were supposed to incentivize good hygiene. Now I have no slinkies and I’d gladly floss five times a day for a slinky

Im okay with them being teenage, mutant, and ninja, but they’re definitely tortoises, not turtles and I’m tired of pretending they aren’t

The hardest part of not being out as trans to my officemate is making jokes that are 1000x funnier in the context of my transexuality but which ultimately fall flat

@DivineKestrel @rooster lol it’s been a couple years since I came out at work so I don’t really remember the last time I had to disclose that I’m trans there (aside from once when I was trying to coax a student out of the closet)