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Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

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Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#151

Post by jstanley »

sph wrote: post #144
once_inc wrote: post #86

For 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…

> Inside a 'thick' nebula, obscuring all other entities in the sky except for their own star and planets. Imagine an interstellar object like Oumuamua passing through and the complete perplexity of a civilization observing it and wondering where it could have come from. You'd be able to peer through the nebula with higher frequency bands than visible light, no? If a civilisation is able to notice an interstellar obje…

But without a long history of looking up at the stars with our own eyes, how would we ever have thought to point radio telescopes up there?

There might be interesting phenomena going on right now that we don't know about just because they're too far awar from what our natural senses can detect.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#152

Post by caf »

andrewstuart wrote: post #20

If you lived on a planet going around one of those stars it sure would be hard to make sense of the universe. "Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"

It would be a somewhat safer place for life than within a galaxy proper - far less chance of a close approach by another star kicking your planet out of its solar system, less chance of taking a sterilising hit by a close by gamma ray burst.

Those living on such a planet might even reasonably conclude that advanced life on a planet within a galaxy, like our own, was very unlikely.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#153

Post by throwthrowuknow »

fnord77 wrote: post #125
once_inc wrote: post #86

For 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…

reasonable inputs into Drake's yield 1. So this is just fanciful

That equation is just a back of the envelope guess, not a proven law. We have a sample size of 1 so we can make no generalizations about the trillions of star systems in the universe.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#154

Post by michaelcampbell »

once_inc wrote: post #86

For 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…

> Far removed from the center of a galaxy, or even on a rogue star that has escaped its galaxy early on. Very few stars visible in the sky.

Wouldn't this be approximately the same star density we see when NOT looking in the plane of the milky way?

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#155

Post by throwthrowuknow »

Reubachi wrote: post #147
skripp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read all three? The first one isn't great but as a trilogy I found it quite good. There are several places where the story building contradicts itself but if you are willing to look past those then it's solid science fiction. It's not on the level of Arthur C. Clarke or Asimov but they were obviosly big influences.

I found the first the best, second unbearable, and third absolutely not worth it given the slog of dark forest. Liu's writing is incredible, but he reminds me of George RR Martin or.....bare with me..Vince McMahon. Unable to get beyond the "fleshing out" phase.

Same, it was nearly impossible to finish due to it being so dull.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#156

Post by throwthrowuknow »

PM_me_your_math wrote: post #145
lmm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's a tedious slog, devoid of interest on any axis: characters, plot, worldbuilding and science are all paper-thin. Its popularity baffles me.

It was tedious, but so was Herodotus. Tedious does not mean uninteresting ...TBP was very interesting; especially the takedown of group-think revolutionary marxists. For example, and purposely vague to avoid spoilage, the young female guard's behavior echoes much of what we're seeing in today's colleges.

Read Born Red for a first hand account of such follies. We in the West love to pretend inconvenient history doesn’t exist.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#157

Post by colordrops »

richardw wrote: post #135
colordrops wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's popularity is pretty easy to understand. It was the first proper scifi novel written in the native tongue of over a billion people.

What is “proper” vs eg the others on this list? Honest question. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_science_fiction

Did you read the wiki link? There's very little, and much of it is more kafka-esque political commentary rather than hard scifi.

I don't know, I lived in China for 9 years, and scifi and fantasy media were highly discouraged by the party (as mentioned in the wiki link), and no one I knew had anything to recommend that was originally written in Chinese. When Three Body Problem came out, people went nuts. Every nerd and engineer in the country read it.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#158

Post by abecedarius »

backpackviolet wrote: post #104
once_inc wrote: post #86

For 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…

What would it be like for civilization to have evolved on a world with a moon (or other large natural satellite) in geosynchronous orbit. There’s just this … thing, in the sky, hovering over one spot. How sacred would that spot be to those people

Good one. The novel Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury had such a moon (the Scowlmoon) as part of the worldbuilding.

For another, imagine having a moon so big it can completely cover the sun... and just the right size and distance to only block the photosphere, leaving the corona visible without instruments. What a show that'd be, what wild myths the life there might make up.

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#159

Post by JackFr »

denton-scratch wrote: post #129
chongli wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planet around a double star one of which is a black hole or a neutron star I'm not sure that would be very habitable. Unless they're far apart, the neutron star/black hole would be accreting matter from its companion and the accretion disk would be emitting large amounts of x-rays. In some cases, they can occasionally increase in luminosity by a factor of 10, emitting powerful bursts of x-rays.

I believe anywhere near a neutron star is going to be extremely inhospitable. A very compact massive object, spinning really fast, and with a strong magnetic field, will produce intense synchrotron radiation, right? Wikipedia says the magnetic field of a neutron star is between 10^8 and 10^15 times the Earth's. The amount of energy in a magnetic field that strong is mind-boggling. Anything anywhere near a neutron sta…

How about the surface?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

Re: Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

#160

Post by colordrops »

andrewflnr wrote: post #136
colordrops wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's popularity is pretty easy to understand. It was the first proper scifi novel written in the native tongue of over a billion people.

I don't think that's true either. I think it was just the first such to get translated to English. I think it's popular because the premise is interesting. The Dark Forest is just part of the vocabulary now, and that's not an accident, it's genuinely worth thinking about and, if not technically new, at least newly popularized.

On a "technicality" front, I'm sure you could find something if you dug through the archives, but really there was no hard modern scifi in China that was heavily published and got any traction until TBP. The party even discouraged fantasy media. I lived there and hung out with nerds, and they were ecstatic when the book came out.
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