dearastronomer

Alex,

We collected a few questions in advance over at /r/astronomy, here's the first:

How common are "intermediate mass" black holes (between stellar and galactic-center sizes)? What about stellar mass black holes without a companion star? Is it likely that there are a few "naked" black holes (no companion or inflowing gas) within a 15 light year radius of Earth? 25 light year?

Are my eyes deceiving me, or did a university professor just "endorse" wikipedia? ;-)

If it helps, I was also told (not by Alex) that I'd be wasting my time as an "adult" student pursuing astrophysics, and most likely wouldn't graduate.

I graduated with a 3.6 GPA with two publications, and less than a year after graduating, obtained a position with a university as a professional astronomer.

Yeah, I guess a lot has changed in the past five or so years.

When I taught, I deducted points for using wikipedia as a source, not because of inaccuracies, but because of sheer laziness (wikipedia articles have a list of sources at the bottom of the page).

Question 2 from the r/astronomy question thread:

What is the ratio of black holes to currently-burning stars in a globular cluster? Does this differ from the ratio within the disk of the galaxy?