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Hundreds of Black Holes Roam Loose In Milky Way
sciencehabit writes "From Science: 'Astronomers suspect that hundreds of medium-sized black holes are roaming loose in the Milky Way. These rogues, according to a new study, are the orphaned central black holes of the many smaller galaxies that the Milky Way has swallowed over its billions of years of existence.'"
And how can the news networks use it to induce fear?
And more importantly, how we can we use it to sell stuff?
"Black hole protective face-masks" just don't seem like a seller, to me.
And the biggest risk that most of us face, getting hit by a car on the way to work.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
That's what has puzzled me to no end since the onset of various hypes. SARS? Your chance to catch it? Play the lottery if you do, your chance for a jackpot is higher. Mad cow? Ditto. Terrorism? 3000 affected of roughly 200 million (directly, not due to the political fallout). Swine/bird flu?
And now compare that to the chance of a heart attack. Lung cancer. Getting run over by a car. Getting mugged. And various freak accidents that happen all the time.
It's a miracle that you're still alive! And it's not because of black holes, not because of terrorism, not because of pandemics. It's because you're living.
Your alternative is to spend your life under your bed. But then again, where's the difference to being dead already?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because terrorism is nothing to be worried about?
factor 966971: 966971
It's not that. The government and it's agencies MUST overreact to these things, or at least hype the media up to let them know they are doing "everything they can" in light of the unfortunate turn of events Katrina caused. Because we didn't overreact at that time, a sh**load of angry black people came out of the woodwork looking for a FEMA handout because Kanye announced Bush hates black people. Now don't flame the comment as racist, it's not, but it was a very dynamic situation that people capitalized on to scam the government for handouts after the fact. If one kid, Asian, Black, Latino, White, (whatever) dies from this, there will be some lawyer telling those parents "Go get the government, they don't like you anyway, let's get rich" he takes a percentage and we keep paying taxes.
note capital 'T'
Terrorism
-noun
Terrorism adj. use by the media to sensationalise otherwise typical occurances into newsworth articles.
1. the use of panic and ignorance to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes
2. the state of fear and submission produced by government or governance
3. a Terroristic method of reporting or of interpreting news reports.
terrorism
-noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.
Invaders must die
Well, I would like to know, if a black hole comes by, does it actually pull a whole planet into its hole, do we know if this is possible...
If it has sufficient gravity, then yes, it is quite capable of "swallowing" a planet. Any black hole that formed in the "usual way" from a collapsing star, certainly has enough gravity (pretty much exactly the same as the star that it was before it collapsed) to suck in a nearby planet if the planet is unfortunate enough to be nearby. Of course, that's only really a problem with these "wandering" black holes - if our sun was mystically replaced with an equally massive black hole (which would be MUCH smaller in size), then the planets would continue to go around it exactly as they do now (although we'd all die from freezing since the hole isn't putting out heat like our sun does, but that's another matter entirely)
I mean at the core a small start implodes and turns into a black hole, but does it have enough strength to suck in another star, or even a whole solar system...
Again, depends on the size (gravity) of the hole, but generally yes - put two stars on a collision course and it'll be pretty nasty.
and what happens if you put 2 black holes side by side, do they cancel each other out...sort of like putting a bag of holding inside a bag of holding...?
Nope, they'd just "merge" in to one bigger one. So, two that had a mass of x, would become a single one with a mass of 2x.
Black holes are pretty weird and there's a lot of strange physics around them when you get deep in to it, but at the very basic level, they're not particularly odd at all - just think of them as objects with a REALLY large mass for their size (but still no larger than many other objects around, such as stars (of course, holes that used to be galactic centres are generally a bit bigger, since our best theories regarding black hole galactic centres involve a LOT of matter going in to creating them)).
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