5 ms·
Not sure if I got the masses right but using 9.62 solar masses and 0.92 solar masses for the black hole and the star respectively with a period of 185 days give
by throwaway4aday 4y ago
Not sure if I got the masses right but using 9.62 solar masses and 0.92 solar masses for the black hole and the star respectively with a period of 185 days gives me a semi-major axis of 1.39 AU (using an orbital period calculator). If that's correct then this star is orbiting quite close to the black hole. Chances of it having any planets would be quite small although I suppose there could be planets orbiting the binary system at a large distance.
I don't speak astrophysicist but I think this part
> Common envelope evolution can only produce the system’s wide orbit under extreme and likely unphysical assumptions. Formation models involving triples or dynamical assembly in an open cluster may be more promising.
means that the black hole and star formed separately and the black hole later captured the star? Hopefully the star had no life bearing planets before that, that would have been a terrible fate.
- sulam 4y agoThat’s how I interpret this as well.
- n4r9 4y ago> the black hole later captured the star? Hopefully the star had no life bearing planets before that That sounds like a decent sci fi novel idea: a civilisation racing to develop interstellar travel before a black hole grabs hold of its star and swallows its planet. How many months/years would it be from the star being captured to the planet being ripped away, I wonder? What would the experience be like for anything conscious on the planet?
- chaosbolt 4y agoWould the star's system orbiting the black hole change anything for its planets though? It's like with us, we barely care about Pluto let alone some distant object the sun and us as well are orbiting.
- akiselev 4y agoIf the black hole formed while in the system, the resulting radiation would wipe out all life in a light year radius. If the black hole captured the star, the tidal forces would slowly rip the planets apart.
- azernik 4y agoMore likely than "swallowing the planet" is disrupting orbits, sending the planet either flying off into deep dark cold space or onto some uninhabitable orbit around the star.
- shagie 4y agoKurzgesagt - What If Earth got Kicked Out of the Solar System? Rogue Earth - https://youtu.be/gLZJlf5rHVs https://youtu.be/gLZJlf5rHVs
- wang_li 4y agoIf the person above did their math correctly, a black hole and a star orbiting each other a 1.39 AU would be a problem for planets. Injecting a black hole like that into our solar system would be real trouble for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, probably Jupiter, and Saturn too. The rest might be ok after a long while for their orbits to stabilize.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoThe orbital period is 185 days so it might be quite close to the black hole.
- bArray 4y agoAt what point do they notice they are being captured? Depending on when this is set (relative to our own tech) and the relative speed at which their host star travels to the black hole, they could get little warning. The smaller the black hole (roughly planet size), I think the interesting it is, especially if it's on a collision course with earth. I could imagine some engineer notices that some more distance probe from the star is suffering from clock skew, but nobody takes them seriously, putting it down to a fault in the circuitry: "It's old, the crystal timer is well out of spec". Then another distant probe also suffers a similar problem, and more people begin to take it seriously. By the time they collect enough evidence that this is not by chance, other people have started to notice that stars have been vanishing behind a space in the sky. When asked why they didn't notice this sooner, there was no telescope pointed there for a while due to its position and budget cuts to the astronomy programme have limited search time. Then the real drama begins, they know that amateurs will also notice soon enough, so they need to control the spread of information. They then need to somehow convince people who will most certainly die, along with everybody they know and love, and work towards the common goal of saving the human race. Then some awesome science fiction around space travel that can escape black holes. Of course something will happen and the escape will be narrow, with them needing to sling-shot off the black hole or something. I would call it something simple like "From Darkness" as not to spoil too much the story. For some reason Matthew McConaughey will be a space cowboy pilot, Amy Adams as space-travel Science officer, Matt Damon is chief potato grower and Denzel Washington has for some reason got to make a super hard decision to leave somebody behind. Samuel L Jackson will at some point get pissed off and force the launch. In a side story, Bruce Willis starts an expedition to go mine the black hole, and instantly gets noodled.
- shagie 4y agohttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/253117230_Science_Fiction_Stories_with_Good_Astronomy_and_Physics_A_Topical_Index https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253117230_Science_F... - which may or may not have specific items in it that you're after, but they are on the harder side of science fiction within the topic. I'd also suggest Crucible of Time by John Brunner, while it doesn't have black holes it does have an astronomical time pressure to it. Flux is part of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence and again has an astronomical pressure. I'm gonna point out that this particular story has a lot of plot detained on Wikipedia with spoilers so... go there realizing that. Continuing with Baxter and astronomical pressure... Raft (the first book of the Xeelee Sequence). An honorable mention in this is another of the great Bs in science fiction his Gregory Before with the Galactic Center Saga... though it lacks the the same astronomical pressures that the other stories I've mentioned have.
- cwillu 4y agoEarth's orbit being disturbed fiction: A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber and Perihelion Summer by Greg Egan
- fjarlq 4y agoAnd the Do Not Go Gentle novels by Mark Millstorm.
- pyuser583 4y agoThat’s basically the plot of Three Body Problem. Is suspect Netflix PR is somewhere lurking around.
- jl6 4y agoI'd probably take my chances on the planet rather than on a rush-job interstellar mission. My totally unquantified intuition is that the perturbation caused by the black hole arriving in the system is more likely to eject the planet into interstellar space than to cause it to intersect with either the star or the black hole. Even on an icy sunless de-atmosphered rock I think survival would be possible, living off the internal heat of the planet. The planet would become the interstellar mission.
- Izikiel43 4y agoI think there was an episode of stargate universe involving something like that.
- ithkuil 4y agoI recommend: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)
- CalChris 4y agoIf the black hole forms separately and then captures a star with an orbiting planet into an orbit, why could the planet not continue to just orbit the orbiting star? Wouldn't this be like a planet orbiting a binary star? There will be exceptional cases but it's not clear to me that the planet has to be consumed by the black hole without consuming the star.
- pdonis 4y agoA planet much closer to the star than the black hole is could possibly continue in an orbit fairly close to its previous one. But remember that the black hole is almost 10 times as massive as the star; that means that the hole is going to strongly perturb the orbits of any planets orbiting the star that weren't very close to the star. That doesn't necessarily mean the hole will consume such planets, just that their orbits will be very different than they were before, and might well become orbits around the hole, not the star.
- twawaaay 4y agoThere is all sorts of possible orbits within the system. Both orbits very close to either BH or the star as well as orbits outside of the binary system orbiting both BH and the star would be very probable and stable. There are more complex orbits possible but these would be more rare and possibly none of those could be stable over billions of years.
- photochemsyn 4y agoNice zoom in video here, ending with display of orbit, and more discussion of why formation is strange: https://interestingengineering.com/science/closest-black-hole-earth-sun https://interestingengineering.com/science/closest-black-hol... > "To elaborate, the star that died and turned into a black hole would have been at least 20 times as massive as the Sun. This likely means that it must have lived only for a few million years. But, if both stars formed at the same time, the gigantic one would have puffed up and swallowed the other star before it could become a "proper, hydrogen-burning, main-sequence star like our Sun". Or, if the star survived, it should have been on a much tighter orbit."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ars 4y agoYou may need to adjust for time dilation near the black hole. > means that the black hole and star formed separately and the black hole later captured the star? That's why they say triplet. It's not actually possible for it to capture it directly without involving a third object. The speed that the sun goes towards black hole is the exact same speed that it goes away from the black hole, the only way for it to be captured is for it to shed some speed into a third object. That's why they're having trouble with the scenarios "unlikely" because it's not easy to do that. Those types of capture is tend to produce extreme and very non-circular orbits. It's extraordinarily unlikely to capture a star and end up in a circular orbit.