The team at AstronomyMag asked ChatGPT reader questions about astronomy. Its answers weren't too stellar.
To be blunt, it didn’t go so well. Based on about a dozen questions from recent issues that we put to ChatGPT , we can firmly recommend against relying on it as an astronomy tutor.
That’s not surprising. ChatGPT doesn’t perform any calculations or query any database of facts or statistics. It’s a language model, generating its responses word-by-word based on the patterns it has learned from its training dataset. And although the reinforcement learning process by which it learned to generate responses has granted it the ability to generate natural-sounding prose, as, “during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth.
During the merger, the black holes will release a tremendous amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves. These waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time that are created by the acceleration of massive objects. The waves produced by the merging of two supermassive black holes can be detected using highly sensitive instruments called gravitational wave detectors.
black hole mergers. All the detections of black hole mergers to date by facilities like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory have been ofblack holes. Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies — with millions of Suns worth of mass — produce gravitational waves with wavelengths so long it can take years for a single wave to pass Earth. There are ongoing attempts to detect this background sea of waves, but not with the instruments we call gravitational wave detectors.
This is wrong, and based on a false premise. As astronomer Andrei Igoshev of the University of Leeds, UK,in our August 2022 issue, “a black hole by itself does not have any measurable magnetic field.” This is because of the “no-hair theorem, which basically states that only three observable parameters can be determined for each black hole: its mass, electric charge, and rotation.