We are interested in studying black holes to learn more about the late stage evolution of massive stars and the underlying properties of compact objects. There are more than 10^8 black holes in the Milky Way, but only a few dozen have been observed.
The majority of stellar mass black holes are detected in X-ray binary systems or in gravitational wave mergers, but these systems represent a small fraction of possible binary configurations. Most black holes will be isolated or in non-interacting systems. Detecting these systems is difficult, since the black holes are electromagnetically dark, but not impossible. In this project we will work with Gaia data and RV observations to characterize a black hole around a Sun-like star.
We will be using data from Gaia Data Release 3. We will search for this data in python, so nothing to download/import.
The radial velocities are from Table D1 of El-Badry et al. (2022). The file in this repository is call "radial_velocity_data.csv".
- Gaia BH-1 paper
- TAT-1 press release
- LIGO mass plot
- RV method video -- except we have a black hole instead of a planet
- Description of magnitude system
- Core Collapse Supernovae
- The Black Hole Mass Distribution in The Galaxy (Ozel 2010) -- focus on sections 1 and 2
- A Unicorn in Monoceros (Jayasinghe 2021)
- An Isolated Mass Gap Black Hole (Lam 2022)
- AAVSO description of phase folding
- Derivation of binary mass function
- Python Cheatsheets
Section 3 of Cooke et al. (2020) describes the questions one should try to answer while reading a paper:
- What is the specific problem this paper is investigating?
- To address this problem what did they observe and what specifically are they measuring?
- What was the primary result of their observations and how are these results novel?
Three part astrobites piece on Tools for Reading Papers
How to (seriously) read a scientific paper
In Class: Project Overview
- Why do we care about non-interacting BHs?
- Nucleosynthesis and the periodic table
- Hyperphysics supernovae
- Observing BHs with GWs
- X-ray binary systems
- There are ~100 million black holes in the Milky Way -- goal is to find the "quiet" ones
- Overview of Gaia Mission
- Setup in Jupyter notebook
Before next class
- Searching Gaia Data with SQL notebook
In Class: Lecture day (no work time :( )
Before next class
- Finish searching Gaia Data with SQL notebook
In Class:
- Review SQL notebook section
- Start CMD notebook
**Before next class
- Finish CMD notebook section