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zuzg t1_iv2r8nm wrote

>Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, just 1,600 light-years away.

And it's 10 times more massive than our sun

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Stairwayunicorn t1_iv3b3p9 wrote

thats very small for a singularity

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unsanctionedhero t1_iv4v4zn wrote

Looked it up, its Scwartzchild radius is 28km. For reference a sphere of that size would have a surface area just slightly more than that of Puerto Rico

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raidriar889 t1_iv5qyys wrote

Compared to supermassive black holes, yes that is obviously small, but it’s a pretty normal size for a stellar black hole. In fact the smallest stellar remnant that would become a black hole is around 2-3 solar masses, so this black hole is not the smallest possible.

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sorehamstring t1_iv5uiig wrote

For stellar mass black holes, like this one, it’s not small. It’s just normal.

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[deleted] t1_iv3vtsn wrote

[removed]

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jmb2k6 t1_iv3xbc9 wrote

Black holes have dimensions though right? The diameter of the event horizon would be dependent on the mass of the black hole

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gimleychuckles t1_iv3yxmm wrote

The singularity is a dimensionless object. It is a point in space. We aren't certain what exactly that point looks like, but we do know it's a point. It has no length, width or height.

So to describe a black hole's size, is to refer to the event horizon, a boundary which is dictated by the black holes mass and spin.

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starmartyr t1_iv43286 wrote

The singularity might not actually exist. It is theorized under relativity, but it doesn't really work well with quantum theory. Unfortunately, we do not yet have a theory of quantum gravity so the singularity is the best model for the interior of a black hole that we have.

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uniquelyavailable t1_iv2zedn wrote

Sounds too close for me

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nilsmf t1_iv3rj88 wrote

The most undercommunicated thing about space is the size of emptiness between the stars and how far away everything is from everything else.

Think of anything a lightyear away as omg-so-incredibly-far-away-it-is. That makes this black hole super-duper-omg-so-incredibly-far-away-it-is.

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wankerbot t1_iv44ogt wrote

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

-DA

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If_I_must t1_iv8sv2t wrote

But don't panic. You seem like a frood who knows where their towel is.

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Miramarr t1_iv4ajcd wrote

When the Milky Way and Andromeda collide and merge, it's still unlikely any of the billions of stars will actually hit eachother.

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Ksradrik t1_iv4fwhy wrote

But dont forget that anything traveling at light or near light speed would be impossible to detect until it actually reaches us.

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st4n13l t1_iv4knoc wrote

I'm personally rooting for microwormhole telescopes

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roxmj8 t1_iv35glh wrote

Nah a 10 solar mass black hole isn’t a danger to earth at that distance.

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braiam t1_iv3biwq wrote

At that distance, it's not even in the range of our system gravitational forces to affect it.

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ssgrantox t1_iv3qorq wrote

The range of gravity is infinite, but the falloff means that it's effectively zero. But technically, it's not zero

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TehFuckDoIKnow t1_iv3w132 wrote

But it is a zero followed by a decimal point and then a number of zeros but also a non-zero amount of gravity. At least according to the math I can’t do.

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hermenaut t1_iv5ugnc wrote

I've heard gravity propagates at the speed of light.

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humbird_gs t1_iw5dtjr wrote

Not quite infinite. Gravity is limited by the speed of light.

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ssgrantox t1_iwc3mwu wrote

Ok how bout this? What is limit on how far light can travel in a vaccum? Thats the distance limit for gravity.

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humbird_gs t1_iw5drj6 wrote

I still eagerly await tabloid headlines shrieking about the imminent danger of earth being swallowed whole by a black hole.

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f_d t1_iv3uukp wrote

As long as it isn't rapidly closing the distance on a particularly accurate collision course. Which it presumably isn't doing.

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roxmj8 t1_iv3w8om wrote

It would be no different than a 10 mass star.

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f_d t1_iv3ztc6 wrote

Which would also not be something you want barreling straight through the solar system toward the Earth. But those are all extremely unlikely scenarios.

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Mollusc_Memes t1_iv5du5h wrote

And even if it were, we’d have over a thousand years to get out of the solar system. Nobody alive today would ever meet anyone who’d get to meet somebody affected by this black hole.

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f_d t1_iv6l9na wrote

It looks like a microscopic black hole passed through the end of your sentence. But you are still correct.

Barring total societal collapse, humans could probably cobble together some kind of interstellar life raft in the space of a thousand years. Would they be able to evacuate most of the planet to a safe destination? Hard to say for sure. With current technology it would be very unlikely. But at least they would know they needed to get to work on it.

For all we know, there's a deadly asteroid already headed toward us from a blind spot. And the Earth won't support life forever. Distant black holes or not, getting a toehold outside the solar system is a vital step if we want our lineage to continue.

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roxmj8 t1_iv42zo3 wrote

We would already know this is happening, and it’s not. Stars don’t move at the speed of light.

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trevour t1_iv6l81l wrote

Actually, I think you would prefer the black hole since it's smaller and therefore less likely to actually hit us (although even if it didn't hit us it could still rip the earth apart with total forces at a certain distance, although I'm pretty sure the distance is still smaller than the radius of the equivalent star)

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roxmj8 t1_iv6lnyx wrote

If a 10 solar mass object came through our solar system it would tear the whole thing apart. Star, black hole, it wouldn’t matter at all.

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KellyTheET t1_iv53ls6 wrote

Is there a way to detect movement of a black hole? I understand we use the redshift/blueshift of the light emitted by an object to gage their direction, but what if it doesn't emit light?

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f_d t1_iv7bp16 wrote

I am not an astronomer, but this particular black hole has a star orbiting it indicating the position of the hidden black hole. Measuring that star's movement should be straightforward enough. Knowing the location of the black hole but without the companion as a guide, they might also be able to watch for hints of it if it ever passes in front of more distant visible objects. Those hints could be compared over time to see if it was growing larger or smaller relative to us. I don't know what the relative movement of a black hole would do to the shifting of the light bending around it.

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Miramarr t1_iv4afhb wrote

A black hole wandering close is really no different than a star. They're both just gravity wells. The only difference is that stars are easier to spot

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spidereater t1_iv5d45e wrote

At that distance it doesn’t make a difference if it’s a black hole or just a star 10x the mass of the sun or even two stars 5x the mass orbiting each other or even a constellation of 10 sun sized stars. It’s a neat quirk of astronomy but not really consequential for life on earth. Actually a large star at risk of supernova is possibly more likely to have an effect than a black hole.

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DygonZ t1_iv555wy wrote

You sound just like my highschool crush...

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[deleted] t1_iv3yx7p wrote

[deleted]

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pogidaga t1_iv45v2f wrote

Proxima Centari is the closest at 4.2 light years away.

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Deliphin t1_iv5mfie wrote

Even if the nearest star was only 2ly away, that would be 800x the distance, not 10x. There are tons of stars within 160ly away.

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westnob t1_iv5re52 wrote

You're obviously correct. I think the nyquil was messing with my reading comprehension. I processed the previous information as. It being 10 l.y.

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Banerinho t1_iv4wg5u wrote

It would take the speed of light 1.6 millenia to get there.

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EarthTrash t1_iv4e0ia wrote

Anyone else secretly hoping it was a hole lot closer than that?

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Perpetually_isolated t1_iv3qjnp wrote

That would make it ridiculously tiny right?

I mean i guess all singularities are small but as far as black holes go that doesn't sound very massive at all.

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wandering_revenant t1_iv65oik wrote

I think someone referenced it being 28 km across. We have cities that are larger across than this thing. But more importantly, our great, great, great X 10 grandkids would be long dead before this thing could come close enough to us to care about it.

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beaniemonk t1_iv40jj8 wrote

And nothing even remotely close to the artist's rendering accompanying the article in any conceivable way.

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chillypete99 t1_iv3ve8d wrote

Only 8 times more massive than my son. O'Doyle Rules!

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lunarmoonr OP t1_iv2hys6 wrote

A Sun-like star orbiting a black hole

noirlab - Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth

I'm not 100% sure these are seen as scholarly articles..

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TSac-O t1_iv3bntc wrote

NOIRLAB is very reputable in astronomy, they manage a lot of time allocations for the telescopes in which the federal government invests, and disseminate data from those telescopes.

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Tranger t1_iv3f4fu wrote

That's a dead ass cool name inmo.

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Patelpb t1_iv3ecjq wrote

MNRAS is about as scholarly as it gets... It's peer reviewed and the process is quite thorough.

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docentmark t1_iv3is73 wrote

You must be trolling. In case you aren’t, MNRAS is the oldest of astronomy journals. Along with the Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy and Astrophysics it’s one of the three main journals of record in the subject area.

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lunarmoonr OP t1_iv4ft6n wrote

nah im not trolling. I really am ignorant of astronomy journals and research institutions. honestly, i just saw this in the news, posted it here, then saw the requirement for "scholarly articles" and rushed to get what i got. hehe

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Blazerblaster t1_iv3mxxd wrote

That probably means there are a lot more black holes out there in just our Galaxy.

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wthulhu t1_iv4ocg3 wrote

This is, imo, the most likely explanation for dark matter. The creation and destruction of black holes on scales that are, in comparison to our current modeling, extremely close, frequent, and microscopic.

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Warpine t1_iv5stev wrote

Signs are pointing to this being a very unlikely candidate for dark matter

They’re a lot of things Cold Dark Matter theories can explain than stellar mass black hole models can’t

CDM explains baryonic acoustic oscillations, why some galaxies are missing DM while most have a halo of it, the evolution of the structure of the universe, etc

This discounts the mounting evidence against swarms of stellar mass black holes. Dark matter outweighs luminous matter approximately 6 to 1. That means for every star in the sky, there should be a black hole ~6x as massive (on average). That’s a lot of huge black holes!!

We’ve surveyed the night sky for thousands of hours, looking for any signs of stellar mass gravitational lensing, but we just don’t find it in sufficient quantity that could suggest any number of any size black hole can even come close to the mass required to be dark matter

tl;dr: there’s a lot of evidence that suggests DM isn’t black holes

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Nidungr t1_iv601jo wrote

But if dark matter is affected by gravity and does not undergo nuclear reactions, wouldn't much of it form black holes anyway?

Dark matter would attract other dark matter and cluster together, but instead of forming stars, just collapse in on itself?

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sticklebat t1_iv6mmtt wrote

No. Clumping together requires dissipative forces (like friction) — there needs to be some way of removing kinetic energy from a system for it to clump together. The leading theory explaining dark matter is that it is made of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). They interact through gravity and the weak force, but nothing else. Gravity is a conservative force and cannot cause clumping on its own, and the weak force is too weak to cause it to any significant extent, either.

That also explains why dark matter forms roughly spherical halos around galaxies that extend farther out than the regular matter. It also explains observations like the mass distribution of the bullet cluster. Two galaxy clusters collided, and all the ordinary matter slowed down as all the gas and dust collided, but the dark matter just passed right through unimpeded, separating out the regular and dark matter of the clusters.

TLDR: gravity doesn’t cause clustering. It needs help from dissipative forces that dark matter doesn’t really experience.

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Warpine t1_iv7s0fh wrote

I suppose that, technically, gravity isn’t conservative. Energy is lose to gravitational waves as WIMPs pass one another and they eventually COULD collapse into black holes, given sufficient (spitballing number here, no math done) quintillions of years

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sticklebat t1_iv8q5yd wrote

That’s true; GR is not conservative. Your estimate of time is by probably too small by tens, if not hundreds, of orders of magnitude, though. For example, the Earth’s orbit is decaying due to gravitational wave emissions, to the tune of about 200 Watts. Assuming everything else magically stayed the same, it would take about 10^23 years (100,000 quintillion years) for Earth to hit the sun. The rate at which gravitational waves would extract energy from a cloud of dark matter would be unimaginably smaller than that.

Also, if WIMPs actually do interact via the weak force, that would probably stop - or at least further delay - black hole formation as they become more densely packed.

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Warpine t1_iv8vj6q wrote

I figured it would be some absurdly long time scale. I didn't know about the timescale of earth losing energy to gravitational waves & crashing into the sun though; thanks :)

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elk33dp t1_iv5nre5 wrote

Yea I heard about the theory of lots of extremely small but dense black holes littered around enpty space impacting gravity, and it made a lot more sense than dark matter to me.

You'd never find these things normally unless they hit something and were looking in that spot at the exact time. Even this one is a miracle to spot.

The only question would be how they all came to be since extremely small black holes shouldn't exist.

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Warpine t1_iv7t7ou wrote

We can observe these black holes, if they existed, via their lensing effect on light passing near it

If you watch the night sky very carefully (with telescopes of course) and train it on a faraway galaxy, you will be able to observe the mass of anything that passes between you and that galaxy. Any massive object would bend the light eeeever so slightly, and you would see the galaxy wiggle in the background

Extremely small black holes would need to exist in such density that they’d need to permeate everywhere. Excuse for a moment that they’d need to be passing through our solar system regularly (this is fine, but we’d detect them no problem), their effects on viewing distant objects in the cosmos would be unmistakable

Also, we can rule a HUGE range of masses for black holes because anything less massive than ~200 million metric tons would’ve evaporated by now. Black holes of this mass would be the trickiest to spot, but fortunately, Hawking has proven they literally can’t exist if they formed in the big bang

edit: another problem with small black holes is that they’d have charge and they’d rotate, both of which make them MUCH “clumpier”. We’d end up with swathes of intermediate and supermassive black holes (MANY more than what we currently see), and these would be trivial to observe

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silent519 t1_ivnvnck wrote

>This is, imo, the most likely explanation for dark matter.

well it's not. we already know this.

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CodeNameSV t1_iv2z00c wrote

That's a horrible artist depiction of a black hole. I really think these artists are trolling the public when attempting to make representations of the articles. Kind of like how American Nintendo game boxart was atrociously bad.

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oxero t1_iv3eph9 wrote

Closest known so far, neat, but I bet there are closer ones we haven't spotted yet.

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Trolloks007 t1_iv32eox wrote

Hopefully due to how close it is, we'd be able to get clearer data from it? Or quicker data at least. 1600 light years away isn't much of a concern, it's gravitational pull isn't going to be brining us in at the same speed or anything. We'd be long gone as a solar system before we even interact on any gravitational level.

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Unfair-Thought5814 t1_iv2xbtz wrote

And we're headed in that direction!!

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HanksMyDogPilot t1_iv2owkg wrote

Wow it looks a lot like the camera on a cell phone.

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infinite_in_faculty t1_iv307yb wrote

What would be amazing is if astronomers didn’t spot it instead it was spotted by a far sighted cobbler or something.

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LeaCTrockboys t1_iv4m9n4 wrote

They should ask it to move further away.

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16elee t1_iv3ojgs wrote

Can someone smarter than me explain why we’re just discovering this one, even though it’s the closest? Is it because it’s much less massive than the ones we’ve already discovered?

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Bofox t1_iv3rqgu wrote

Give this a read if you’re curious!

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/11/221104113504.htm#:~:text=hole%20to%20earth-,Gemini%20North%20telescope%20on%20Hawai'i%20reveals%20first%20dormant%2C%20stellar,hole%20in%20our%20cosmic%20backyard&text=Summary%3A,hole%20in%20the%20Milky%20Way.

Essentially, you have to be looking at the right place at the right time. We cannot detect black holes without the aid of their affects on physics around them. This one was trickier as it is dormant and therefore pretty impossible to detect. It lies in a binary system (sharing orbit with another star) so they witnessed this other star’s orbit get thrown off from a much denser object- this dormant black hole

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InGenAche t1_iv3tk61 wrote

What does 'dormant' mean in relation to black holes? Is it not actively gobbling something up right now making it dormant?

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f_d t1_iv3v5h5 wrote

They are very hard to spot when they aren't consuming anything or creating enough distortion of background objects. There could easily be closer, smaller ones.

>It was identified by observing the motion of its companion star, which orbits the black hole at about the same distance as Earth orbits the sun.

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Firmala t1_iv3t6an wrote

They should name it gargantua

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btribble t1_iv3wzi0 wrote

That means that alien observers near the black hole would be watching ancient Roman television. I imagine there's a lot of stuff regarding the invasion of Gaul.

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MyrKnof t1_iv53h4f wrote

I mean, who else would spot it?

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Lokkuri t1_iv5tl70 wrote

If all singularities are infinitely small, what dictates the Schwarzschild radius in the first place, larger objects that are transformed into singularities have larger radius, but the singularity is always the same size?

Or is it something underneath as spacetime that stretches downwards that dictates the size, if so how far down can it go?

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Th3Pirahna t1_iv3t5wx wrote

This gives me some good trash talking content on Xbox live... AKA Kyle's mom

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[deleted] t1_iv41bkq wrote

[deleted]

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SassiesSoiledPanties t1_iv4gzg0 wrote

You could never accelerate any object that has a mass to the speed of light. Due to relativistic effects, the object's kinetic energy starts increasing, that energy has a mass equivalence and as we know the more massive an object is, the more it resists acceleration. Therefore the more energy you invest into accelerating the object, its relativistic mass (energy) grows infinitely. It would require infinite energy to push it into lightspeed.

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PhilOffuckups t1_iv4urmx wrote

Imagine they were created like a fart bubble when a star dies. So basically the planet shits itself and pops out a fart ring.

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ImInYourCupboard t1_iv3u90c wrote

I don’t have the balls. What time frame are we working with?

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CoolSwim1776 t1_iv3ae2k wrote

Too close for my comfort. Black holes are the ultimate in absolutely destruction.

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arcanum7123 t1_iv3f9p6 wrote

It not only has a literally immeasurably small effect on earth due to its gravity, but at 1600 light years away if it were traveling at the speed of light (which it is traveling nowhere near), it would take 1600 years to reach us

There is absolutely 0 threat to earth from this, especially in our lifetimes. There are plenty more dangerous objects in the universe as far as we're concerned. You should be more worried about the sun than that black hole

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CoolSwim1776 t1_iv3n1jn wrote

See you say that. But the fact is that it is close enough that if it orients in the right direction ( don't know if it isn't mind you) a big enough piece of the it's orbiting star getting ate up could send a massive burst of gamma rays our way. We won't know it either until it hits us either as we are seeing the light of that star 1600 years ago.

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arcanum7123 t1_iv3osyk wrote

Gamma ray bursts are not formed by a black hole feeding (and definitely not one this small). You are much more likely to die to any number of other things, terrestrial or celestial, than something black hole related

If you want to live in fear of something like that be my guest, but as someone who wrote 2 papers on black holes for their degree, you'd do much better living in fear of things that 1) you have any amount of control over whether or not it'll kill you and 2) have any tangible level of a chance of actually killing you

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CoolSwim1776 t1_iv3p2g2 wrote

Fine then. Take away my cosmic horror vibe. I'll just settle on plane old global warming and resource conflicts in the near future. :/

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kobresia9 t1_iv3exv3 wrote

That’s an overkill. We don’t need to worry about black holes with everything we have on the planet

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Nobpointe t1_iv2u0nk wrote

Life just gets worse and worse for.this generation

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soMAJESTIC t1_iv2vjjt wrote

This is not some threat.

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oodelay t1_iv2z7is wrote

Well my safe bubble is 1600 light years and this black hole is invading my private place

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Potietang t1_iv3107y wrote

Considering the black hole at the center of our own galaxy is 26,000 ly away it’s definitely disturbing.

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soMAJESTIC t1_iv318wk wrote

It just means the black hole is also in the same galaxy.

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ontopofyourmom t1_iv35tov wrote

A black hole is no more threatening to earth than any other object of the same mass, and there are thousands and thousands of such objects (eg large stars) within 1,600 light years

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Pegajace t1_iv3dvim wrote

This black hole presents no threat to us whatsoever. It's one hundred million times further away from Earth than the Sun is, and it's only got ten times the Sun's mass. Since the force of gravity decreases according to the square of the distance between objects, the effect it has on us is so tiny it can't be measured. For example, the dwarf planet Pluto pulls on the Earth with a gravitational force ~1,500 times greater than the black hole does, simply because Pluto is millions of times closer.

Even if the black hole was vacuuming us in at the speed of light (which, to be clear, it will not and cannot do), it's still 1,600 light-years away and would take 1,600 years for the Earth to get there—not exactly a problem for this generation.

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