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Black Holes
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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I'm not an astrophysicist, but that ends up being the weird perception thing about them, right? Mostly they're like a star of the same mass, and then a few will get really big and be at the center of a galaxy, but the perception is that of a natural disaster.
Big ball of plasma in the center of the solar system that will definitely eventually explode and wipe out anything left alive on any surrounding planet? NBD. An object of the same mass but it's smaller so it doesn't shine? People picture it as being more immediately violent for some reason because the "light can't escape" thing sounds so wild.
Pop sci-fi seems to be fond of intermediate-mass black holes (EG Interstellar, Star Trek StrangeNew Worlds), and for something kinda the size of a star, they are "scary."
In other instances (like in TV Foundation), a close orbit to the accretion disk is a source of suspense.
And then there's the "stealth" aspect. Stellar-mass ones and below are very small and (potentially) quiet for something with the mass of a star, eg easy to stumble upon.
And in some very advanced universes (eg the online Orion's Arm), even with "hard" sci fi, swimming through a star's nuclear plasma is totally doable. But a black hole is an impossible boundry of physics, and an particularly extreme object useful for astroengineering.