News You Can Use

Some more April Fool's Day humor.

Humans like to party, and New Year celebrations are a great way to do that. However New Years celebrations that rely on an orbital year don't line up with those that use a Lunar Calendar, as there are currently 12.368 synodic months (moonths) in a year. There is cyclostratigraphic, paleontological, and tidal rhythmite data that reveal that over billions of years the interplay of angular momentum between the Sun, Earth and Moon has changed the rate of rotation of Earth, and at the same time evolved the orbit of the Moon, and therefore the length of a Lunar month. Using a subset of this data and referencing literature models of the Moon's orbital evolution, we create our own simple model to determine "True Happy New Years", time periods when there were an integer number of lunar synodic months in an Earth orbital year. This would allow modern calendars to pick a shared New Year's Day, and party accordingly. We then predict the next True Happy New Year to be in 252 million years, and offer suggestions to begin the party planning process early, so that we as a planet may be ready.

Mark Popinchalk, "Party Planning the Next True Happy New Year: Lunar Orbital Evolution Epochs with Integer Synodic Months Per Year" arXiv:2303.17697 Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure, submitted for 4/1/2023 

The lower limit on the chicken density function (CDF) of the observable Universe was recently determined to be approximately 10−21 chickens pc−3. For over a year, however, the scientific community has struggled to determine the upper limit to the CDF. Here we aim to determine a reasonable upper limit to the CDF using multiple observational constraints. We take a holistic approach to considering the effects of a high CDF in various domains, including the Solar System, interstellar medium, and effects on the cosmic microwave background. We find the most restrictive upper limit from the domains considered to be 1023 pc−3, which ruffles the feathers of long-standing astrophysics theory. 

Rachel Losacco, Zachary Claytor, "Nuggets of Wisdom: Determining an Upper Limit on the Number Density of Chickens in the Universe" arXiv:2303.17626  Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, 0 chickens were harmed 

How many gravitational-wave observations from compact object mergers have we seen to date? This seemingly simple question has a surprisingly complex answer that even ChatGPT struggles to answer. To shed light on this, we present a database with the literature's answers to this question. We find values spanning 67-100 for the number of detections from double compact object mergers to date, emphasizing that the exact number of detections is uncertain and depends on the chosen data analysis pipeline and underlying assumptions. We also review the number of gravitational-wave detections expected in the coming decades with future observing runs, finding values up to millions of detections per year in the era of Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope. We present a publicly available code to visualize the detection numbers, highlighting the exponential growth in gravitational-wave observations in the coming decades and the exciting prospects of gravitational-wave astrophysics. See this http URL We plan to keep this database up-to-date and welcome comments and suggestions for additional references.

Floor S. Broekgaarden, "ChatGPT scores a bad birdie in counting gravitational-wave chirps" arXiv:2303.17628 Comments: 1 April submission, with fun videos for visualizing the landscape of gravitational waves! (they are awesome!) See this http URL