No hair but plenty of feathers: are birds black holes?

TL;DR

This paper explores whether bird chirp sounds can be modeled by gravitational waveforms from black hole mergers, revealing some similarities and proposing a novel philosophical perspective.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analogy between bird chirps and gravitational waveforms, suggesting potential links to extreme matter effects or physics beyond the Standard Model.

Findings

Bird chirp waveforms can resemble high mass ratio, precessing black hole binary signals.

Some bird chirps are similar to glitches in gravitational wave detectors.

The analogy offers a new philosophical perspective on the origin of the universe.

Abstract

The imitative verb "chirp" is thought to originate from 16th-century Middle English. Meanwhile, this same word has been used to describe the gravitational waves (GWs) emitted from the merger of compact objects, such as black holes and neutron stars, since at least the 1990s. Motivated purely by this linguistic overlap, we study whether the chirps of birds can be modeled by compact binary waveforms. In particular, we consider a test case of the Northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), finding that its time-reversed chirp can be approximately modeled by that of a high mass ratio, precessing black hole binary, with a number of indications towards extreme matter effects or beyond the Standard Model physics. Importantly, this waveform correspondence is not so straightforward for all bird species, as some chirp morphologies are far more akin to glitches seen in GW observatories. With these comparisons made, we propose an alternative solution to the longstanding philosophical conundrum: rather than the chicken or the egg, perhaps it was the Big Bang which truly came first.