AbouBenAdhem

AbouBenAdhem t1_je9vp5e wrote

  • 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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AbouBenAdhem OP t1_iuddzsu wrote

> The size doesn’t matter.

Real estate inside the skull is expensive, evolutionarily, and humans have sacrificed a lot to maximize brain volume. If it were possible to see as well with bird-sized eyes, why haven’t we already evolved them in exchange for bigger brains?

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AbouBenAdhem OP t1_iuchfr1 wrote

Cats have better night vision than we do because they’ve traded cone cells for rods—so they have higher resolution and dynamic range in their grayscale vision at the expense of being red/greed colorblind.

But if you scaled up a cat’s eye to human size, it seems like it should be even better—similar to a camera with a bigger objective lens and/or ccd. Unless I’m missing something?

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