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.
Yeah, black holes in media where they are depicted as a giant space vacuum cleaner is a big pet peave of mine. Unless you get really close, nothing is remarkable about the orbital mechanics of a black hole. The equivalent mass star would have burned you up at a much further distance than the gravity starts to become noticeably wonky.
It's a shame that writers focus so much on the gravity and neglect accretion disks and astrophysical jets which do extend large distances and are visually stunning as well.
also the way they bend light, a proper physically simulated depiction of a black hole is so fucking cool because it just kinda intuitively looks like it's so heavy it's bending spacetime around it!