Could this kind of trigger effect the standard candle application of Type 1a's? For example, if a black hole triggers a type 1a and that perturbs the type 1a light curve in some way (possibly because less mass could be consumed in the explosion than you would get if one was triggered by mass accretion) and the rate of triggering of this kind changed over time as the universe aged and somehow the population of primordial black holes changed, or the distributions of white dwarf candidates and pbhs changed...
Anyone have guesses about how a transiting primordial black hole would effect a Sun like star? Paper is about tidal forces inducing supernova in white dwarfs. For that matter how might it effect sea tides?
Many physicists have pointed out several flaws in the dark forest theory, which makes for a great read but doesn’t really carry over to the real universe 1:1.
Can you point me to more info on that or just tell me? I am curious about reasons to be more optimistic than that book lays out. I would much prefer the Carl Sagan view of the Cosmos as one where it simply makes no physical nor cultural sense at all to be aggressive toward other stellar civilizations.
I think a fragile world hypothesis is more interesting and scary.
Instead of a superintelligence killing any emerging intelligence, superintelligence is so smart that it can perturb spacetime in ways that easily kill itself.
Kind of like the idea that LLMs will give anyone with a garage the ability to create killer viruses (wild claim), a superintelligence might trivially create black holes that engulf it. If the intelligence is distributed across many agents (or nations), someone will try something stupid that kills the entire population.
It'd be even scarier if they could accidentally collapse the supposed vacuum state. Universal annihilation at the speed of light just because you got too smart.
Fragile world / fragile universe meets "too smart for your own good".
Leaving aside the fact that there's no evidence superintelligence is even possible, no amount of intelligence alone will let you "trivially" create black holes. Creating black holes requires a ludicrous amount of energy. Planet-scale energy, maybe solar-scale energy. Energy is conserved. You can't just think really hard and have it. At minimum you have to already have the energy and materials to build a machine that will let you (mostly build another machine that lets you) harness that much energy.
It's at least not something you'll do by accident.
Sounds logical to me. It's already remarkable that we haven't done this with fission weapons. It's not unreasonable to assume that within a century we'll have antimatter weapons. Destructive potential only goes up.
Kind of chilling to think about these tiny black holes. If they have enough gravitational pull to destabilize a white dwarf, I don't want to know what they'd do to our solar system.
These supernova-generating black holes are atomic scale (Schwartzchild radius of 15pm to 15nm), yet they carry the momentum of a large asteroid. If one of these hit the earth, they would cause a life-ending apocalypse like the event that ended the dinosaurs. The fact that this has not happened yet is encouraging.
PBH (if they exist) are microscopic in size. If they're real and qualify as a potential dark matter candidate they have passed our solar system many times with the only thing happening being undetectable gravitational tugs.
Wouldn't Type Ia supernovas caused by blackholes have a different brightness?
That could mean the entire cosmic ladder needs to be revised, maybe this could resolve the crisis in cosmology..
This is one of those headlines where I simultaneously think "cool" and now have a new source of low-grade background anxiety about. It can have a seat next to false vacuum collapse.
Take comfort in the fact that compared to the size of the universe, the speed of light is like molasses in January. Cosmological eschatology is a very slow game, and the odds of you being alive and in the right place to be a spectator are literally astronomically small.
The bad news is that if a black hole is not primordial, the minimum mass is high enough (2-4 M_sol) that it doesn't so much "pass through our system" as "we pass through its".
I'm not 100% confident, but rough approximation suggests that a close approach of even 5 AU even at typical interstellar velocities might have an unplesant climate impact by increasing the eccentricity of our orbit.
Déstabilise orbits - definitely, but the same would be true of a star or other celestial body.
But our risk of getting sucked into a black hole is really tiny. (Although personally if I had a chance to enter a black hope, I would. I’m just naturally curious.)
We know what something with about 2 solar masses looks like at about 5 light years, because there is such a thing a bit closer: the Alpha Centauri system.
So (and again, this is very rough approximation) I mean AU: consider the high speed of interstellar encounters so it won't be there for long, and that it takes the full pull of Sol 6 months to turn us around 180°.
Also, yes, in general this would cause a lot of the Oort cloud to destabilise and a long period of bombardment of all the planets.
At 5 AU, gravitational force would be 1/25 or 4% the strength of the sun at 1 AU. If the black hole was four solar masses, it would exert a pull about 16% as strong as the sun. Probably not enough to rip us out of orbit, but enough to seriously perturb it. I think it's at least an end-of-civilization event.
5 AU is the perfect distance to really wreck Jupiter, though.
Not an astrophysicist, but I'm thinking 5 AU could quickly fry the Earth - because it takes very little in the way of solar comets, asteroids, and dust to build a temporary accretion disk around such a black hole. That disk might have a temperature of >1M degrees. Plus the dynamo effects of the disk's interactions with the solar magnetic field? Yeah. 5 ly sounds much safer.
Instead of a superintelligence killing any emerging intelligence, superintelligence is so smart that it can perturb spacetime in ways that easily kill itself.
Kind of like the idea that LLMs will give anyone with a garage the ability to create killer viruses (wild claim), a superintelligence might trivially create black holes that engulf it. If the intelligence is distributed across many agents (or nations), someone will try something stupid that kills the entire population.
It'd be even scarier if they could accidentally collapse the supposed vacuum state. Universal annihilation at the speed of light just because you got too smart.
Fragile world / fragile universe meets "too smart for your own good".
It's at least not something you'll do by accident.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260310115201/https://www.willi...
I'm not 100% confident, but rough approximation suggests that a close approach of even 5 AU even at typical interstellar velocities might have an unplesant climate impact by increasing the eccentricity of our orbit.
But our risk of getting sucked into a black hole is really tiny. (Although personally if I had a chance to enter a black hope, I would. I’m just naturally curious.)
So (and again, this is very rough approximation) I mean AU: consider the high speed of interstellar encounters so it won't be there for long, and that it takes the full pull of Sol 6 months to turn us around 180°.
Also, yes, in general this would cause a lot of the Oort cloud to destabilise and a long period of bombardment of all the planets.
5 AU is the perfect distance to really wreck Jupiter, though.
But never zero.