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  • Posted by $ jlc 11 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    This has been an interesting subject to research, but a bit frustrating as well. In the small galaxy, the stars are .2 light year apart and there are only 2 million of them in the whole galaxy. Since the BH is a super-sized item, this gives me an image of the stars clustered closely around it. There is hard radiation (Hawking radiation) emitted by a BH...but I do not know how to figure out what the habitability range would be in such a galaxy.

    Sorry - no answer from me.

    Jan
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  • Posted by johnpe1 11 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    'fraid not, Neal -- we're living miracles, worth
    celebrating every minute ... and we should act
    better, in that light; yeah?! -- j

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  • Posted by johnpe1 11 years, 11 months ago
    the universal recycling center -- if only it weren't
    such a long toss to get our trash out there!!! -- j

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  • Posted by $ jlc 11 years, 11 months ago
    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
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  • Posted by NealS 11 years, 11 months ago
    Does this make anyone else feel totally insignificant on this little speck of rock that we live on?
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  • Posted by CTYankee 11 years, 11 months ago
    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.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 11 years, 11 months ago
    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.
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  • Posted by Hiraghm 11 years, 11 months ago
    A study of the laws of physics there would be interesting.

    And imagine living in a place where interstellar travel not only was possible, but could even be commonplace.
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