> barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes
14 minutes?
Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
111–120 of 191 posts
Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
#112For those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live: - Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even…
Another cool places for habitable planets to be:
- Active galaxy with a jet stretching perpendicularly to the galaxy plane for distances much bigger than the galaxy's size, shinning in all the wavelengths.
- Planet around a double star one of which is a black hole or a neutron star.
Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
#113Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asimov's Nightfall tells the story of the beings living on a planet surrounded by 6 suns. The sky is always bright with at least a sun over head. They've only known the universe consisted of bright sky and the 6 suns for centuries. On a rare eclipse event where all the suns are hidden, they are suddenly in darkness and looking into billions of stars at the night sky.
surely such a system would be extremely unstable right?
There actually is a sextuple star system in the night sky.
Castor looks like a single star but actually consists of three binary stars: two of them in a binary system that is itself in a binary system with the other binary star.
I don't know if there could be a stable position for a planet that would never experience nights, but there is at least some reason behind the idea.
Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article is even worse, that it shows an illustration without a caption identifying it as an illustration, which is very misleading. (Later they show it again with the caption saying it's an illustration.)
In their defense, NASA did use the same artistic rendition...
NASA used that image, but the first words under it were "this is an artist's impression of..." which is the right way to label things if you don't want people mistaking an illustration for real data.
Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
#116I wonder if this is an opportunity to detect intelligent life. If the black hole is affecting any intelligent life on the way, they might do something to save themselves or their planet, which might be detectable?
If they could do something on a scale to stop (or even avoid) a runaway black hole they'd have to be enormously powerful. I would think even for species well beyond our capabilities the only option would be to flee.
By our current understanding the only thing one could do to a black hole is increase its mass (useless) or attempt to change its path gravitationally (requiring a massive amount of gravity -> requiring a massive, massive amount of energy)
Fleeing probably makes the most sense for any species.
Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
#117For those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live: - Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even…
Another cool places for habitable planets to be: - Active galaxy with a jet stretching perpendicularly to the galaxy plane for distances much bigger than the galaxy's size, shinning in all the wavelengths. - Planet around a double star one of which is a black hole or a neutron star.
> shinning in all the wavelengths
Just a precaution so we don't get sued.
Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve heard that book(series?) pop up quite a lot recently. Is it worth a read?
The best sci-fi trilogy I’ve ever read. I don’t know why there is a lot of hate on hn towards it.
It's written with a different focus than traditional western sci-fi. Pacing is different, characters are unexpected in certain ways, etc. I can see how people don't like the style, I personally enjoyed the 'something different'.
Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
#119For those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live: - Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even…
> A double planet system Did you mean a double star system? Or something like Earth-Moon where the size difference between the two bodies is much lesser?
I'd imagine something like the Anarres/Urras double planet system described by Ursula K Le Guin in The Dispossessed (one of my favourite novels) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that a reasonable assumption to make? I don't think we have any evidence of other places we look being "largely the same" with respect to life conduciveness. It took billions of years for our own planet to achieve multicellular life, which is a significant fraction of our best estimate of the lifetime of the entire universe up to this point.
I suppose it's easier to believe you're a special snowflake than it is to believe you're just average.
The question isn't about what's easier to believe, it's about what the evidence supports. The probability for life (or multicellular life or intelligent life or technological life) to evolve on any given planet is strictly between 0 and 1. You can believe what you want, but the facts don't support any stronger statement than that.