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Fast-Moving Black Hole
otisaardvark writes "New Scientist story about a very fast moving Black Hole in our very own Galaxy. Seems it was formed from a supernova explosion. I wish stars like this could have a more exciting name than GRO J1655-40 though. More at the BBC."
Merging Black Holes
I can think of a couple ways to use a black hole to generate power. Rotating black holes have huge amounts of kinetic energy, and such a hole that had an electric charge could be used as a huge generator, if we could get an electric field large enough to surround it.
The other method uses very small holes, about the size of a proton with the mass of a mountain. Due to Hawking radiation, such a hole would put out more power than a six nuclear power plants (if I remember the statistic).
I know lots of things. Most of them are wrong.
I've read that if you could get close enough to a black hole, and you threw something into it that was attached to a cord strong enough, the black hole will pull the matter into in, thereby pulling the cord, which in turn can be hooked to a turbine to produce electricity. The book (The Last Three Minutes) says that theoretically, you could get energy consistant with e=mc^2 this way.
"Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee." --Bender
Im not so sure that this is really practical in the sense you meant, but just being near a large enough blackhole would provide a simple one way time machine (cf twins paradox).
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
Nice to see that this bothers people who have detailed understanding of the physics.
Seems there are several problems unresolved questions here.
Is the black hole moving with a campanion star? Or, just skimming off some mass as it passes by? If it is actually moving *with* the companion star, what kept them together? Assuming a SN explosion accelerated the black hole to 400,00 kph, how did it drag along another star? Even if they were a close binary pair before the SN explosion, wouldn't the black hole now have system escape velocity?
Another question, how off balance does the explosion have to be to generate this kind of speed? If the explosion is 1% of balance, how much mass energy was released in the total explosion to get this speed? How do you get a SN explosion that is that off balance?
Could this pair have been accelerated by another mechanism such as a close pass to a tight binary star system? How tight would it have to be? What kind of stars (neutron, black holes...) to get a pair with enough energy to speed something up like that?
Like you said. this doesn't make sense.
Stonewolf