6 ms·
Unfortunately, there is a rather large one not one sixth of that distance away (a million trillion miles is actually rather large - 170 kly - approximately doub
by misnome 22d ago
Unfortunately, there is a rather large one not one sixth of that distance away (a million trillion miles is actually rather large - 170 kly - approximately double the size of our galaxy)
- bell-cot 22d agoYes - I took the grandparent comment's "descr to a non-physicist" as "describe to someone who really isn't into math or hard sciences". Those folks will hear "million trillion" as "a really Really REALLY REALLY big number". Not as "1 x 10^18".
- Dylan16807 22d agoI guess, but "light year" is easy to say, easy to understand, and much less likely to mislead. And most black holes would probably be safe at that distance. Though the issue of small black holes is worth bringing up. If you scrunch up one cubic kilometer of stone into a black hole, that's heavy to be stable for trillions of years, but light enough to pass between the Earth and the moon without causing serious problems. And we really have no idea what the smallest existing black hole is.
- sfn42 22d agoYou'd be surprised how may people don't even understand that a light year is a measure of distance.
- Dylan16807 21d agoHmm. Well even then I think a million million miles will suffice, that's over ten thousand AU, .17 light years.
- bell-cot 20d agoMaybe? But if (1) it's a few solar masses, and (2) the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud exists - "from 2,000 to 200,000 AU" - then the black hole could send a lot of planetesimals flying off in random directions. Quite of few of those could be moving toward Earth's neighborhood, some at very high speed. Humans might soon join the dinosaurs.