That’s how I interpret this as well.

> the black hole later captured the star? Hopefully the star had no life bearing planets before that

That sounds like a decent sci fi novel idea: a civilisation racing to develop interstellar travel before a black hole grabs hold of its star and swallows its planet. How many months/years would it be from the star being captured to the planet being ripped away, I wonder? What would the experience be like for anything conscious on the planet?

Would the star's system orbiting the black hole change anything for its planets though? It's like with us, we barely care about Pluto let alone some distant object the sun and us as well are orbiting.

If the black hole formed while in the system, the resulting radiation would wipe out all life in a light year radius. If the black hole captured the star, the tidal forces would slowly rip the planets apart.

More likely than "swallowing the planet" is disrupting orbits, sending the planet either flying off into deep dark cold space or onto some uninhabitable orbit around the star.

Kurzgesagt - What If Earth got Kicked Out of the Solar System? Rogue Earth - https://youtu.be/gLZJlf5rHVs

If the person above did their math correctly, a black hole and a star orbiting each other a 1.39 AU would be a problem for planets. Injecting a black hole like that into our solar system would be real trouble for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, probably Jupiter, and Saturn too. The rest might be ok after a long while for their orbits to stabilize.

The orbital period is 185 days so it might be quite close to the black hole.

At what point do they notice they are being captured? Depending on when this is set (relative to our own tech) and the relative speed at which their host star travels to the black hole, they could get little warning. The smaller the black hole (roughly planet size), I think the interesting it is, especially if it's on a collision course with earth.

I could imagine some engineer notices that some more distance probe from the star is suffering from clock skew, but nobody takes them seriously, putting it down to a fault in the circuitry: "It's old, the crystal timer is well out of spec". Then another distant probe also suffers a similar problem, and more people begin to take it seriously.

By the time they collect enough evidence that this is not by chance, other people have started to notice that stars have been vanishing behind a space in the sky. When asked why they didn't notice this sooner, there was no telescope pointed there for a while due to its position and budget cuts to the astronomy programme have limited search time.

Then the real drama begins, they know that amateurs will also notice soon enough, so they need to control the spread of information. They then need to somehow convince people who will most certainly die, along with everybody they know and love, and work towards the common goal of saving the human race.

Then some awesome science fiction around space travel that can escape black holes. Of course something will happen and the escape will be narrow, with them needing to sling-shot off the black hole or something.

I would call it something simple like "From Darkness" as not to spoil too much the story. For some reason Matthew McConaughey will be a space cowboy pilot, Amy Adams as space-travel Science officer, Matt Damon is chief potato grower and Denzel Washington has for some reason got to make a super hard decision to leave somebody behind. Samuel L Jackson will at some point get pissed off and force the launch. In a side story, Bruce Willis starts an expedition to go mine the black hole, and instantly gets noodled.

If you're interested in reading something similar, your description reminds me of The Black Cloud by the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. I have to say I found the writing quite clumsy, but owing to him being an astrophysicist himself there was quite a lot of attention to detail in making the plot scientifically realistic (within certain bounds).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud

I'm hooked. You should write this up as a screenplay.

Or, for extra challenge/fun, as a stage play.

Perihelion Summer[0] by Greg Egan is a great story with a similar premise (A black hole passing by the solar system and affecting earth's orbit)

[0]: https://amzn.to/3DNiUDj

"When Worlds Collide" is a similar story.

The setup to your story sounds good, but the implied ending is unrealistic.

I think a better way to write the latter part of the story is that, finally, after lots of bickering, humanity mostly comes together and starts building a device that will save humanity, but the only have one chance to make it work. However, some religious terrorists infiltrate the project and destroy it. Unfortunately, it was the only one and there's no time to build another, so humanity perishes in the end.

Yawn. That's one of the most overused tropes in fiction. It'd be much more surprising and inventive to do a story where they do come together and work hard only to fail due to running up against the laws of physics. The audience might actually learn something from it and you could play out the stories of the characters as they grapple with their inability to save the Earth or delude themselves into thinking they still have a chance. If you want to send a message it would be more productive to harp on the fact that better astronomical programs may have spotted the danger sooner and allowed for other solutions.

I'd prefer a happier ending though with a bit more of a sci-fi spin. Narratives where everybody dies in the end were gimmicky to begin with and are just becoming tired and depressing now.

>That's one of the most overused tropes in fiction.

Huh? How is that overused? I've only seen it in "Contact", except, unfortunately, the project was saved by the government having enough foresight to build a 2nd, identical and secret machine in Hokkaido, Japan, though I did think that plot point made a good statement about religious nuttery in America (which really isn't a problem here in Japan).

>It'd be much more surprising and inventive to do a story where they do come together and work hard only to fail due to running up against the laws of physics.

I hate those kinds of stories, and this has been seen in sci-fi before too. The whole story is just pointless because it was a no-win scenario from the start, so there's no lesson at all, other than "what's the point of even trying?".

I like my story idea because it makes a good statement about how dangerous and destructive religion is.

>If you want to send a message it would be more productive to harp on the fact that better astronomical programs may have spotted the danger sooner and allowed for other solutions.

That kind of plot won't make for a good story.

>Narratives where everybody dies in the end were gimmicky to begin with and are just becoming tired and depressing now.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here: narrative where everybody dies are not even remotely commonplace in popular fiction. Even Game of Thrones has a happy ending of sorts, though lots of people die along the way. You must be watching or reading some kind of fiction I'm unaware of.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253117230_Science_F... - which may or may not have specific items in it that you're after, but they are on the harder side of science fiction within the topic.

I'd also suggest Crucible of Time by John Brunner, while it doesn't have black holes it does have an astronomical time pressure to it.

Flux is part of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence and again has an astronomical pressure. I'm gonna point out that this particular story has a lot of plot detained on Wikipedia with spoilers so... go there realizing that.

Continuing with Baxter and astronomical pressure... Raft (the first book of the Xeelee Sequence).

An honorable mention in this is another of the great Bs in science fiction his Gregory Before with the Galactic Center Saga... though it lacks the the same astronomical pressures that the other stories I've mentioned have.

Earth's orbit being disturbed fiction: A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber and Perihelion Summer by Greg Egan

And the Do Not Go Gentle novels by Mark Millstorm.

That’s basically the plot of Three Body Problem.

Is suspect Netflix PR is somewhere lurking around.

I'd probably take my chances on the planet rather than on a rush-job interstellar mission. My totally unquantified intuition is that the perturbation caused by the black hole arriving in the system is more likely to eject the planet into interstellar space than to cause it to intersect with either the star or the black hole. Even on an icy sunless de-atmosphered rock I think survival would be possible, living off the internal heat of the planet. The planet would become the interstellar mission.

I think there was an episode of stargate universe involving something like that.

I recommend:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)

If the black hole forms separately and then captures a star with an orbiting planet into an orbit, why could the planet not continue to just orbit the orbiting star? Wouldn't this be like a planet orbiting a binary star?

A planet much closer to the star than the black hole is could possibly continue in an orbit fairly close to its previous one. But remember that the black hole is almost 10 times as massive as the star; that means that the hole is going to strongly perturb the orbits of any planets orbiting the star that weren't very close to the star. That doesn't necessarily mean the hole will consume such planets, just that their orbits will be very different than they were before, and might well become orbits around the hole, not the star.

There is all sorts of possible orbits within the system. Both orbits very close to either BH or the star as well as orbits outside of the binary system orbiting both BH and the star would be very probable and stable.

There are more complex orbits possible but these would be more rare and possibly none of those could be stable over billions of years.

Nice zoom in video here, ending with display of orbit, and more discussion of why formation is strange:

https://interestingengineering.com/science/closest-black-hol...

> "To elaborate, the star that died and turned into a black hole would have been at least 20 times as massive as the Sun. This likely means that it must have lived only for a few million years. But, if both stars formed at the same time, the gigantic one would have puffed up and swallowed the other star before it could become a "proper, hydrogen-burning, main-sequence star like our Sun". Or, if the star survived, it should have been on a much tighter orbit."

You may need to adjust for time dilation near the black hole.

> means that the black hole and star formed separately and the black hole later captured the star?

That's why they say triplet. It's not actually possible for it to capture it directly without involving a third object.

The speed that the sun goes towards black hole is the exact same speed that it goes away from the black hole, the only way for it to be captured is for it to shed some speed into a third object.

That's why they're having trouble with the scenarios "unlikely" because it's not easy to do that.

Those types of capture is tend to produce extreme and very non-circular orbits. It's extraordinarily unlikely to capture a star and end up in a circular orbit.