Questions tagged [black-holes]
For questions about a region of space time where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it.
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On the immediate effects of a small, short term black hole
What immediate effects would a small, short-term black hole have if it appeared in a residential backyard? How small or short-lived would it have to be to be survivable, if it is survivable at all?
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What exactly would happen if a black hole was introduced into the sun?
A ship powered by a black hole of a few hundred thousand tons (say, under $6 \times10^8$ kg, which would have a lifetime of several years and a power output of a few hundred petawatts) crashes (...
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Would the Hawking radiation from a small black hole make a feasible propulsion source?
I was wondering if a small black hole would make a feasible/possible propulsion source, and if so, how.
Pros
Black holes release Hawking radiation, would should be easy to direct in a certain ...
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Is it safe to orbit HDE 226868?
I'm considering a story where an exploration is devised to explore a binary system containing a black hole; the choice is Cygnus X-1, with its companion supergiant star HDE 226868. It would likely be ...
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How would one destroy a black hole?
Science-Fiction has tools to destroy anything: atoms, molecules, DNA, cellular organisms, multicellular organisms, buildings, streets, cities, countries, continents, planets, and even stars. Some ...
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A planet illuminated by a black hole?
Is it possible for a planet to be heated and illuminated by a black hole due to Hawking radiation at the same intensity as by a star?
What mass and size should a black hole have to produce the same ...
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How big a black hole is needed for this story?
The story begins in classic disaster film style. A small rogue black hole is approaching our Solar System. It isn’t going to get close enough to destroy everything, but it will agitate our Sun, ...
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Physiological effects of living on a world close to a black hole
Let's say you were living on a planet near (but not too near) a black hole. I'm thinking of the planet Miller in the movie Interstellar.
Obviously there are some strong tidal forces. But at this ...
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What is the best planetary orbit around a black hole in order to support life?
Note: I am aware of a previous question
Physiological effects of living on a world close to a black hole
As I understand it, that question refers specifically to a planet that is in a non-ideal ...
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Black hole launcher
Humans developed a new weapon:
Black hole launcher.
How it works:
A mobile particle acelerator acelerates two particles to huge speeds and collide both. A mini black hole is created. The mini ...
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How much energy would a Type III civilisation get from a Quasar Milky Way per day?
Let's say, (in the far future), that humans have become really advanced beings and are at the verge of becoming a Type III civilisation. Now, they need a gargantuan energy source for various purposes, ...
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What are the most compact batteries to store energy from my quazar power plant?
In my previous question, I dealt with the possibility of harvesting the energy of the accretion disk and jets of a quasar Milky Way, by the use of multiple mirrors and panels that are orbiting around ...
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Protect a planet against a black hole attack
Suppose in a very very long future, humans have become relative powerful military force in galactic politics due to a very powerful weapon: the ability of creating black holes wherever we want. Now we ...
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What would happen if the black hole at the center of a galaxy was removed?
Say you have a galaxy, possibly ours, with a central black hole. In an instant the black hole falls through a plot hole and vanishes.
What happens to the rest of the galaxy?
Does everything keep on ...
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How long until a small black hole makes the sun fail?
Imagine aliens dropped a small black hole (say, 1% of the moon's mass, so you wouldn't notice the difference in gravitation) into the sun (from the far side of the sun, so nobody on earth can see it). ...
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Can a single, larger black hole be split into multiple smaller black holes?
Essentially, my question is, can one larger black hole be split into a system of smaller black holes?
I'm assuming energy requirements will be prohibitive, and that it may not be possible without ...
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Finding out the mass of a black hole for it to last ten thousand years
In my story, one of the characters essentially possesses something akin to true invulnerability and is essentially immortal due to [redacted]. In this part of the story, a group of terrorists with ...
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What happens if I shot a blackhole pellet point blank at someone?
Imagine I had a sophisticated gun that is capable of producing a micro blackhole on contact with a target, that blackhole is designed to be completely evaporated as hawking radiation in exactly 1 ...
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How close could a planet get to a super massive black hole before being destroyed
I wanted to create a scene where two god-like characters are talking or fighting on a planet or fragment of planet to which they've teleported that's about to be obliterated by a black hole.
The ...
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Seeing Using Gravitational Waves [duplicate]
I know that humans' eyes are adapted to detect some electromagnetic waves, and their ears are able to detect sound waves. What I would like to ask is: Is it plausible for a species to biologically ...
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Would the gravitational waves from a binary black hole system make a feasible weapon?
Backstory: Okay, so we have decided to wage war on numahs for the macguffenite. We mostly are doing things like shooting lasers at each other ships, and occasionally shooting high velocity projectiles ...
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Would it be possible to have a small black hole dissipate as it 'sinks' into the earth?
I recently watched this Kurzgesagt video exploring the question of what would happen if you had a black hole the size of a coin.
To summarize the video:
A black hole with the MASS of a coin would ...
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What would the effects be on the surrounding landmasses if a 1mm black hole appeared on the earths surface for 5 seconds? [duplicate]
First of all I've read the other posts and know what the effects of a black hole appearing on the earth's surface is. It goes through the crust, the tectonic plates break apart, volcanos appear ...
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How much energy does this sun crushing ship, the CrushSun, use?
Useless Backstory
"Why are you waking me up Sergeant? And why did we enter near-light speed?"
"We received a distress call, and there wasn't enough time to notify you, sir."
"What kind of distress ...
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How would one weaponize a black hole?
Assume two massive space empires begin to war with each other. Now, they come to a standstill because they are so alike that they are unable to outnumber, outwit, or outmaneuver each-other and come to ...
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1 Light Year Diameter Planet
Suppose a species has limitless resources and the ability to construct megastructures of an astronomical scale.
Would it be possible, given antigravitational technology (hypothetical), to create a ...
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The Moon turns into a black hole of the same mass -- what happens next?
If there were a black hole orbiting an inhabited planet, with the gravity of a typical moon (e.g our moon, orbiting a similarly weighted planet to ours), what practical differences would arise when ...
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How do I feed my black hole?
Strange title I know, but you'll understand why quickly.
I wanted to use a black hole to create absurd amounts of power for hopefully obvious reasons (kind of useful). The problem with natural large ...
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Black hole as a storage device?
I'm writing a sci-fi story, and there is a giant autonomous computer planet that constantly gathers resources from around the universe using drones. It stores a super weapon at the core of the planet, ...
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Black holes as heat sinks
Cooling in space is a well known difficulty. There are many unpleasant consequences like no stealth in space, difficult space battles which turn into a short wars of attrition (because you have to ...
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How far could life develop inside a black hole before it explodes?
Apparently it is theoretically possible for a planet to achieve a stable orbit around the singularity at the centre of a black hole within the event horizon. This means that life could hypothetically ...
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A supermassive black hole is coming our way. When's the latest that we would notice?
I'm trying to build a story around a supermassive black hole, which is ejected from a merger of two galaxies, that is hurtling our own way. What is the smallest realistic distance at which the black ...
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Intragalactic velocity past the central black hole
In my story people are traveling from somewhere beyond the opposite side of the galaxy to Earth. The distance traveled is approximately 66 million light-years. I would like the travelers to ...
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Smallest Black Hole to 'heat' a Gas Giant
So I want a large power source to heat my new real estate on the Jovian moons. I create a micro black hole (MBH), maybe a few kg, maybe more and drop it into Jupiter. I expect the following to happen [...
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Escaping a blackhole with an Alcubierre drive?
If your ship just got trapped inside the event horizon of an super massive black hole, could the ship "accelerate" back out with an alcubierre drive?
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What would the sky look like to a being inside the event horizon of a black hole?
Suppose it was possible to travel to inside the event horizon of a black hole safely. Also suppose said black hole is large enough that the curvature of the horizon of the surface of the central mass ...
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Spaceship orbiting a black hole under the event horizon - a prison where no one escapes
The relationship between the distance, $d$, of the event horizon from a black hole's center and the tidal acceleration, $a$, experienced by an object near a black hole allows for scenarios in which a ...
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Can we identify black holes in our path flying between the stars?
When traveling at fast speeds through the galaxy, would it be possible to identify where all the black holes were on your path? I know most black holes are identified by their affect on other nearby ...
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Is it possible to build a black hole (kugelblitz) gun?
Assume that space warfare is dominated by gamma and x-ray lasers (Wakefield-Plasma and Free Electron Lasers) capable of killing targets several light-seconds away. Stealth in space is possible due to ...
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Habitability zone around a Supermassive Black Hole
I have just found perhaps the biggest thing in the universe: A black hole named SDSS J010013.02+280225.8. It itself is 12 billion times more massive than our sun, and its accretion disk is 439 ...
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How to Create and Use a Black Hole Computer Drive?
I have been working on a futuristic story where information can be stored and used with a black hole. This is a highly advanced human society that has accomplished interstellar space travel via both ...
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How structurally strong would an object need to be to survive a trip through an ergosphere?
Let us assume we have a Kerr metric (rotating) black hole of 10 Sol-masses, spinning at 300 revs/s (as measured by a rest frame observer). What yield strength (assume that yield strength is limiting ...
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How can we detect a small black hole?
We’re in the late 2020s and we’ve all the planned future telescopes - WFIRST, JWST, Giant Magellan Telescope etc - and technologies.
There’s a small black hole in the outer solar system. It has a ...
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How to accelerate living things really fast without killing them?
Okay, so our society has starting harnessing significant amounts of energy from its sun, and has started mass producing micro-black holes (although there have been experiments with gathering energy ...
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What would it look like in the accretion disk of a feeding supermassive black hole?
I wanted two characters unaffected by the heat and gravity to be close to a super massive black hole within the accretion disk, at times moving in orbit and at times completely still.
Stars and ...
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Can I contain and control a small black hole within a facility?
A black hole is supposed to suck in everything by nature. Micro black holes are theorized to "fizz out", so for example if one was on Earth it would not grow until Earth was consumed. It would seem ...
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Is a particle beam the best method to fire a black hole at a target?
I want to weaponize black holes as projectile attacks in my story from small to supermassive and the two ways i can think of is using mass to attract mass or using matter to push it. Using a particle ...
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What would a binary black hole look like from the surface of a planet orbiting that system
If it is even possible, what would the Goldilocks zone be like - in fact is such a system even possible of holding life - around a binary black hole? Could it have planets orbiting it?
EDIT 1: Oh ...
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How can an advanced civilization harvest energy from an x-ray binary?
An x-ray binary is a binary star system consisting of a star and a stellar remnant. As matter is ripped from the star and is then accelerated into the neutron star/black hole by its gravity, x-rays ...
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What would happen to a planet 10x the size of Jupiter, if there was a golf ball sized black hole in its core?
What would happen to to a planet 10 times the size of Jupiter, if there was a black hole the size of a golf ball in the core of the planet?
Would the planet be eaten by the black hole?
Or would the ...
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