Friday, May 31, 2019

In astronomy, one is an outlier, two is a population


--- Emily Petroff at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, quoted in "Radio wave bursts from space keep hitting Earth and we don't know why," New Scientist, 9 January 2019

In context:

Knowing there is more than one repeating FRB means we are likely to find further ones. “In astronomy, one is an outlier, two is a population,” says Petroff. Hunting down that population requires looking at a large portion of the sky for a long time.