Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth
noirlab.edu
noirlab.edu
Size : 10 x sun's mass.
Distance : 1600 LY.
Previous closest had been : ~5000 LY.
For comparison, a star going supernova to harm earth has be to within 70 LY.
Maybe start by shifting the orbit of the whole solar system out-of-plane. (I guess that would be done by electromagnetically stimulating the sun to produce a polar jet for a few million years.) That provides our distant descendants another 100M years to alter the orbit further so as not to just plunge back in on the other side. But even without, the risk would grow back to our present level for only (say) 10M out of each 100M years, strictly an improvement.
Orbital plane maneuvers are infamously expensive in delta-V.
Spending the following 100M years increasing our galactic orbital radius might put us in the outskirts before crossing again, if we did not actually escape entirely.
We might also be able to put off by a few billion years the sun itself sterilizing the planet, using the same apparatus. We could only hope it would not be abused to destroy us itself.
Andromeda isn't due for another 4.5 Gy. Presumably its central black hole and ours will merge shortly thereafter, maybe sterilizing the whole galaxy? I am content to leave worrying about that to others.
what is that based on?
*edit
For anyone interested in this topic I suggest Phil Plait’s book in the subject
500 ly is supposed to be equivalent range for a magnetar quake. I think the nearest known magnetar is around 10x that. But even 1% of the radiation needed to sterilize the solar system would be pretty uncomfortable.
Virtual black hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_black_hole
Timeline of gravitational physics and relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_gravitational_phys...
- [ ] Superfluid Quantum Gravity
-- [ ] GR + Bernoulli's re: Dark Matter/Energy: Fedi (2017),
"What If (Tiny) Black Holes Are Everywhere?" https://youtu.be/srVKjWn26AQ
> Just one Planck relic per 30km cube, and that’s enough to make up most of the mass in the universe
Quantum foam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam
It says "Though there are likely millions of stellar-mass black holes roaming the Milky Way..." I thought it was billions, now.
> It's not entirely clear how the solar-mass star survived that episode, ending up an apparently normal star, as observations indicate. All theoretical models that allow for this survival predict that the solar-mass star should be in a much tighter orbit than is actually observed.
Should this last sentence actually read: "All theoretical models that allow for this survival predict that the solar-mass star should be in a much wider orbit than is actually observed."?
See section 8.4 for details: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06833 But basically the idea is that they are assumed to have interacted in the past (based on the distance), and given that, all current models of such interactions would predict a very tight final orbit for the solar mass star.
The issue here is that I don't read spanish. I used a translator - google, actually. And I know painfully well that sometimes translations are clunky even when they are generally good. I don't have a lot of experience between Spanish and English, but I do with Norwegian-English, and those are both germanic languages and often translate decently.
But not always. Some things are just messed up. Some things don't translate word-for-word simply because folks express things differently.
So yeah, it might be weird in English. Might not be in Spanish, though.