Re:New type of black holes – Non interacting low-mass black ...
by samplatt on Thursday October 31, 2019 @08:10PM
(#21415106)
It's much more statistically likely to happen closer to the center of the galaxy, where there is a much higher density of both star systems and black holes.
Charles Stross' book Incandescence is about (amongst other things) a race of sentient insects that hide inside a small asteroid orbiting a quasar that had had an encounter with a black hole sometime in the distant past, and had been ripped apart... but was now orbiting close enough to the star to be mostly safe. Maybe.
Re:New type of black holes – Non interacting low-mass black ...
by charliesome on Thursday October 31, 2019 @07:50PM
(#21414997)
> People dismiss that as astronomically unlikely, but it must have happened many times somewhere in the universe
It's hypothesised that a Mars-sized planet once collided with Earth in the early history of the solar system (about 4.5 billion years ago), creating our moon today:
Re:New type of black holes – Non interacting low-mass black ...
by perl4ever on Thursday October 31, 2019 @07:53PM
(#21415010)
Right, and a more recent paper suggests the reason for the seas on the near side of the moon is that the earth temporarily shone like a star, whereas the moon being smaller cooled faster overall. So the moon was melted by earthshine.
Re:New type of black holes – Non interacting low-mass black ...
by sliken on Thursday October 31, 2019 @09:16PM
(#21415458)
Not sure that quite meets this definition, but there's a newly named object Synestia that sounds pretty similar.
Re:New type of black holes – Non interacting low-mass black ...
by perl4ever on Thursday October 31, 2019 @09:40PM
(#21415588)
A very close sub-brown dwarf:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_0855%E2%88%920714
Re:New type of black holes – Non interacting low-mass black ...
by ryan_j_naughton on Monday November 04, 2019 @02:45PM
(#21445636)
> So the moon was melted by earthshine.
Do you have any links with more info on this?
People dismiss that as astronomically unlikely, but it must have happened many times somewhere in the universe. The average person doesn't win the lottery once in their life, but someone does.
I believe we're beginning to appreciate that just like there are more small objects in the solar system than large ones, and there are more small stars than large ones, there are significantly more solitary planets than stars or even brown dwarfs, and they would be almost as hard to see coming as a black hole until they got close.
There are many disasters that at least microbes could recover from, but anything the size of Mars that wandered in would, I presume liquefy and sterilize the entire planet. It would be so unexotic and yet humans would be completely impotent to do anything.