The black hole is weird. (Destiny)

by General Battuta, Sunday, March 05, 2017, 04:09 (2820 days ago) @ Funkmon

The black hole stuff, that is. The thing that would kill your people isn't the black hole, which has less gravity than the progenitor star, but the death throes of the star prior to black hole.

Furthermore, no accretion disk would occur, as there would be nothing to fall into the black hole. Theoretically, in a binary system, the second star could accrete, but they would have to be very close. If life developed on planets where the stars were so big they could be far enough out that they basically orbit the two suns as one (which I don't think is possible in a stable way, but I know nothing about orbits so cannot claim that for sure), then the loss of more than half (because the bigger the star, the sooner it dies) of their radiation cannot be made up by one star being accreted. It only has so much energy. If they orbited the stars in a figure 8, the accretion disk of one sun into the other would destroy the planets.

And that's even discounting the supernova. A supernova is so energetic it outshines the entire galaxy, usually for some weeks. I was doing some imaging of M82, a bright galaxy easily findable with a telescope, a couple years back, and there was a supernova in it. I took the opportunity to try to find the galaxy with binoculars now that the spot was there and was brighter than the rest of the galaxy. I could see it with my binocs, but not its home galaxy.

So imagine the power of a hundred billion stars. How could they survive that?

Space magic is a solid answer to one of these questions, but by trying to explain exactly what the space magic is doing, it kills it IMO.

IIRC it's implied that the Traveler moved the ten Harmony worlds into orbit around the (already existing) black hole, did whatever was necessary to get an accretion disc going (if there wasn't one already), and configured the disc to work as a primary.

Whatever the Traveler did was apparently pretty good for Ana-Harmony.