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Black Holes
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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I'm not an astrophysicist, but that ends up being the weird perception thing about them, right? Mostly they're like a star of the same mass, and then a few will get really big and be at the center of a galaxy, but the perception is that of a natural disaster.
Big ball of plasma in the center of the solar system that will definitely eventually explode and wipe out anything left alive on any surrounding planet? NBD. An object of the same mass but it's smaller so it doesn't shine? People picture it as being more immediately violent for some reason because the "light can't escape" thing sounds so wild.
They are like stars in the sense of orbital mechanics.
But a star can be completely understood by the laws of physics we know. While a black hole breaks our understanding and we have no idea what's going on in there.
It's the fear of the unknown.
I don't know. Isn't it rather that they were predicted by the laws of physics we know (or got to know with Einstein) and everything about them can be fully described and is known by our current understanding of these physics?
But I get what you mean. They are a symbol of the weird counterintuitiveness of the theory of relativity.
Sort of. They were predicted by Einstein theories. But in a way so absurd that it was supposed to be just a faulty part of the theory when you push it to a extreme. Basically the "infinite collapse" that occurs and that should put all mass in a infinitely small space.
That cannot be true, it collides with quantum theory.
We have observed the space surrounding black holes, and that is spot on with the theory. But we know nothing about what occurs inside them. We don't know the density of the singularity, it's structure, how that matter behaves at quantum levels. We know nothing about that.
Once you enter a black hole is not only that you would be torn to pieces and pieces to atoms, we don't even know if atom structure would even exist in there. Maybe even boson-fermion structure doesn't even exist inside a black hole.
Pop sci-fi seems to be fond of intermediate-mass black holes (EG Interstellar, Star Trek StrangeNew Worlds), and for something kinda the size of a star, they are "scary."
In other instances (like in TV Foundation), a close orbit to the accretion disk is a source of suspense.
And then there's the "stealth" aspect. Stellar-mass ones and below are very small and (potentially) quiet for something with the mass of a star, eg easy to stumble upon.
And in some very advanced universes (eg the online Orion's Arm), even with "hard" sci fi, swimming through a star's nuclear plasma is totally doable. But a black hole is an impossible boundry of physics, and an particularly extreme object useful for astroengineering.
Yeah, black holes in media where they are depicted as a giant space vacuum cleaner is a big pet peave of mine. Unless you get really close, nothing is remarkable about the orbital mechanics of a black hole. The equivalent mass star would have burned you up at a much further distance than the gravity starts to become noticeably wonky.
It's a shame that writers focus so much on the gravity and neglect accretion disks and astrophysical jets which do extend large distances and are visually stunning as well.
If we ever invent FTL someone is gonna make a black hole bomb.
It's already invented, just put enough mass in too little space. Don't need a star like mass, any will do if you can compress it enough.
To be fair I think "light can't escape" thing really just is that wild, it's pretty captivating. The idea of it being the death of a star, one of the most important things to all life we know about, only adds to that sense. Stars are massive billion-year explosions, yes, but they also bring warmth and light and beauty. Black holes are the death of all of that, even if it's not technically more dangerous from the same distance
Especially since we still don't know how information preservation works in a black hole. There are ideas yes but we still aren't sure if any of them are even right.
It's not that light can't escape that is scary it's that the future of anything passing the event horizon changes to eventually end up in the singularity. Black holes are not just death, most of the things in the universe are death to us, black holes are literally the end of time.
Or they are passages to other universes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Einstein%E2%80%93Rosen_bridges
The true death of that is more depressing than torturous: Heat Death.
The sun isn't heavy enough to go supernova. (Unless it has a companion, but there's no evidence of one so far.)
It will still expand and shed enough stuff to effectively blanch whatever part of the solar system it doesn't actually engulf, though.
It doesn't even have to go supernova to kill everything, which is kind of the point.