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comment by am_Unition
am_Unition  ·  1657 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Could a habitable planet orbit a supermassive black hole?

Reading the headline, my immediate reaction was "No. OK, maybe one planet in a trillion or quadrillion-ish."

    ... he says, hopefully.

    ... he says with an increasing sense of misery.

    ... says Schnittman, with more than a hint of wishful thinking.

    This sense is quickly lost as he moves on to other reasons to be pessimistic.

This Schnittman guy sounds like the most expressive bi-polar astrophysicist ever (is he challenging my title?). Or, more likely, the author enjoys a fair bit of embellishment.

I had a homework assignment on nonlinear surface waves, and one case with the limit of ~0 background/unperturbed depth, with a near-infinite wave amplitude, like the waves on the Interstellar black hole planet. The difference is, in Interstellar, I presume that the wave/s is/are tidally locked with the black hole, and the planet beneath is rotating. There would have to be a sweet spot of rotation/revolution rate on the planet for the waves to be coherent, although it could cycle through phases or something for not-sweet-spot rotation rates. That'd be a chaotic system, though, so the concept of "phases" would at least somewhat break down. But yeah, for the same planet near nothing else, if you created a huge column of water and somehow gave it just the right amount of push, it does indeed propagate with relatively little change in shape or other characteristics.

Stop posting good shit, I have a job now.





kleinbl00  ·  1657 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I got to the part where the blue shift of neutrinos was a possible source of ambient heat and recognized that I was so far at sea from the shores I know that all I could do was nod appreciatively. The concept of a night sky 100 times brighter due to the dilation of time? That's some poetry.

am_Unition  ·  1657 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Even if supermassive, primordial black holes are wormholes, there's the whole issue of the universe possibly ending juuuuust before you reach the event horizon, due to relativistic time dilation making time pass almost infinitely slower near the event horizon vs. anywhere further away from the black hole. If you survive the blue-shifted irradiation dosage. If the black hole is sufficiently large that you aren't ripped apart at a sub-atomic level.

It's fun to imagine in-situ observations of an event horizon in an attempt to validate theories. It's fun because it doesn't even make sense, even if you threw something microscopic down there on a perfectly massless fishing line.

kleinbl00  ·  1657 days ago  ·  link  ·  

As it turns out, you are wrong about this every October 9th.

Also, because search is occasionally awesome, Kardashev Arms.

user-inactivated  ·  1657 days ago  ·  link  ·  

God I love reading this kind of stuff - time dilation and the like. Undoubtedly it's way over my head and I don't fully appreciate what's going on but it's so cool. I wish I had taken science courses in High School.