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A person should be allowed to dream sometimes, how freaking cool would this be. A block hole right in our neighbourhood, even closer than Alpha Centauri. Just i
by wrnr 6y ago
A person should be allowed to dream sometimes, how freaking cool would this be. A block hole right in our neighbourhood, even closer than Alpha Centauri. Just imagine what kind of things can be learned from studying it.
- 127 6y agoCool, and absolutely terrifying.
- wlesieutre 6y agoOn the flip side, you wouldn't be any less dead if you fell into Jupiter and that's a lot easier to get to
- behnamoh 6y agoFalling into Jupiter is an eye-opening experience tho, esp. if you fall into the "big eye" (pun intended). Just the sheer massive size of a turbulent, harsh planet that covers all the horizon... The world becomes flat much faster near such a planet.
- p1mrx 6y agoWe're already on a planet that covers the horizon; some say there's more beyond the horizon. Would Jupiter look subjectively bigger, if you couldn't also see the Earth for comparison?
- m_mueller 6y agoI guess it wouldn't, but it probably would be a much longer fall until either pressure is crushing you or your heatshield fails.
- mhh__ 6y agoCrossing into the event horizon of a black hole has a very profound poetry to it in that you will never be able to communicate back your findings. I find the romance of the destruction of knowledge very intriguing - falling into a black hole is similar to shooting a mathematician in the head in that regard. Great way to go, all things considered.
- aaomidi 6y agoYes you'd be dead.
- mhh__ 6y agoI am prepared to put down MTW and dream
- FreeFull 6y agoExcept that with a black hole this small, you'll be pulled apart by the tidal forces long before you even reach the event horizon. If you want to make it across the event horizon intact, you need a much larger black hole, like the one in the centre of our galaxy.
- koheripbal 6y agoWhich conversely means that supermassive black holes allow you to pass through the event horizon unharmed.
- manigandham 6y agoNot sure if you meant it that way but information actually can't be created or destroyed in quantum mechanics. This is known as the no-hiding theorem [1] which has been experimentally proven and which leads to the black hole information paradox. [2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hiding_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hiding_theorem 2. ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
- bouncycastle 6y ago
- scotth 6y agoIn what sense? It poses no threat to us.
- Konohamaru 6y agoThis is not scary. Yes the event horizon will expand the more matter falls into its gravity well, but otherwise a black hole acts like a normal planet orbiting the Sun.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y agoIs there a theoretical limit on the minimum mass of a black hole? It's counter-intuitive to me that something could get dense enough to form a black hole and not have more mass than the Sun, or at least enough mass to steal Pluto.
- Robotbeat 6y agoYeah, the event horizon the size of a Planck unit. Again, unless you get super close, it acts identical to a regular planet of the same mass.
- gizmo686 6y agoDo we actually have a theory that predicts a theoretical minimum size of a Planck length? Black holes are an artifact of gravity and the theory of relativity. The planck unit comes up as a result of quantum mechanics. Without a working theory of quantum gravity, we do not have a description of what happens in scenerios where both theories are relevent.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoThere's an approximation that's expected to hold, semiclassical gravity, where both theories are relevant. This is the background against which calculations of Hawking radiation and black hole evaporation are made.
- tfigment 6y agoI don't think so. With the various colliders there was talk of black holes but they would be small and super short lived. The question may be more interesting if we talk about stable black holes at least by human time scales.
- dehrmann 6y agoNo more terrifying than any gravity well.
- galaxyLogic 6y agoYes the cool thing about black holes is that the terrible things inside them can never get out. It's like a prison-planet with the most terrible criminals in there, but they can never escape. Laws of Physics prohibit that
- dodobirdlord 6y agoLess scary than most, since the paper predicts it would be somewhere in the range of 5cm diameter. Very difficult to hit, even if you were trying.
- sporkologist 6y agoAcrophobia, anyone?
- deepspace 6y agoAgree with cool, but not with terrifying. According to the paper, the mass would be ~5-15 M⊕ at a distance of 300-1000AU, so not a threatening object in any way.
- behnamoh 6y agowait, 2020 is not over yet...
- kzrdude 6y agoI assume M-plus means Mass of earth?
- NamTaf 6y agoYes. Similarly, M with a dot in the circle is the sun.
- dyslexit 6y agoAnd at 5M⊕ would have a diameter of about 9cm (or at 10M⊕ about the size of a bowling ball).
- echelon 6y agoHow would we ever find that? Gravitational lensing of the background stars? Do we stand a chance of uncovering it at all? Edit: from the abstract, > The observational constraints on a PBH in the outer Solar System significantly differ from the case of a new ninth planet. This scenario could be confirmed through annihilation signals from the dark matter microhalo around the PBH Wild.
- senectus1 6y agoits hung about out there for a few millennia, I doubt it's going to be a problem for us in a the entire lifespan of the human race...
- aaron695 6y agoA fun way to not be terrified - "What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole?" https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/ Also need one for lava, but looking up quicksand is one of the few that might make it worse for you.
- PhantomGremlin 6y agoCool, and absolutely terrifying. Sibling comments are questioning this. But ... what if the black hole's orbit around the sun isn't something approximately circular? What if the orbit resembles a long-period comet? Highly elliptical? What if it puts in an appearance near the sun every 100,000 years? How would we know? What in the historical record could we study?
- QuesnayJr 6y agoThey have a pretty good idea of what the orbit would look like to explain the eccentric orbits of TNOs. It's not circular, but it's not that eccentric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine#/media/File:Planet_nine-etnos_now-new3.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine#/media/File:Planet...
- LoSboccacc 6y agosomehow it never occurred to me that black hole could actually orbit what does it mean for the event horizon to move one side is fairly predictable as space gets swallowed as the black hole advances but the space at the rear side would just sort of pop out of the event horizon or be stretched from the previous position what would happen to the space behind a black hole moving at relativistic speed? Bet there some paper I cannot understand about it somewhere
- dreamcompiler 6y agoMuch less terrifying than a 5-Earth-mass planet. Such a planet would be quite easy for a spacecraft to crash into. But if all that mass is the size of a tennis ball, it would be very easy to miss. Unless your aim was perfect you'd just slingshot around it.
- keyle 6y agoit's not more terrifying than a planet or a sun, it's just more dense and invisible to the eye :)
- mseepgood 6y agoI don't see how this is more terrifying than, say, have a sun in the neighbourhood.
- tobmlt 6y agoSeconded.