the universal recycling center -- if only it weren't
such a long toss to get our trash out there!!! -- j

Does this make anyone else feel totally insignificant on this little speck of rock that we live on?

What happens to dark matter when it encounters a black hole?

The space around a black hole is very violent, but if dark matter absolutely does not interact with normal matter then the dark matter would simply spiral into the black hole with nary a whimper.

But more interestingly, what if dark matter interacts with itself? Wouldn't the black hole be surrounded with an accretion disk of dark matter, just as it is wrapped in one of normal matter? Would the dark matter's angular momentum correspond to the axis of the angular momentum of the normal matter? Would it influence the momentum of the black hole?

Here's the big question. Would an accretion disk of dark matter emit dark energy? And the big followup. Could this dark energy be tachyonic without violating special or general relativity? If the dark matter and or dark energy are tachyonic, then it is reasonable to assume that there might exist an even denser core of dark goo inside the black hole. Otherwise it's plausible that the dark particles are not constrained by the gravitational field, meaning they would pass through the singularity (region of infinite curvature) and emerge someplace else.

Very cool. Thanks for posting this.

Cool. It says it's 0.2% the size of our galaxy. If starts are spaced around 10 light years apart in our galaxy, they'd be 0.02 light years apart there. That's just over 1000 AUs. The heliopause of our system is only 100AUs, so there'd be hardly any space for interstellar media.

As Hiraghm says, travel to other stars in a lifetime wouldn't be such a huge stretch. We couldn't do it with our fuels, but it's not such a huge leap.

It would be strange of intelligent life at some point lived in some system in that galaxy. Nearby stars everywhere would be a fact of life for them.

is the picture real?

In a tiny galaxy with a ginomous black hole, would there not always be a high background radiation, due to the destruction of matter proximal to the black hole? If that is the case, then such small galaxies might be like living in a radiation sterilization device - all life that tries to evolve is continually wiped by the radiation.

Jan

Very cool.

Nice find. Thanks.