endless sky ships wont folllow through wormhol

Spinning ones say “If you get too close, I’m going to eat you. On the opposite side, the horizon is bigger because those photons were going upstream, so to speak, and many of them were pulled to a halt by the spin and then either pulled into the hole, flung away, or pulled into a spinward orbit. The reason the horizon is D-shaped is that photons coming from that direction were able to get a lot closer to the horizon, since they were moving in the direction of the rotation. In that picture, the hole’s equator rotates from left to right. (Picture and simulation by Alain Riazuelo.) From our orbit around the spinning million-solar-mass hole, though, the picture is much different: This is because, when we orbit closer to the hole, we get a kick from the spin that twists our orbit around.įrom nearby, a non-rotating black hole looks like its name: a black circle of nothingness, surrounded by a distorted background of stars and galaxies. But, sitting in our command module, here’s what our orbit looks like (starting from parameters that should have given us a nice elliptical orbit):

Orbits around ordinary objects are very close to simple ellipses or circles. I feel like there’s a flaw in my reasoning, but I don’t have time for such things.Įven orbits don’t work the way they normally do, near a spinning hole. When they’re not looking, I’m gonna hit the retro-rocket and plunge us to our deaths. Jürgen and Charlize are suspicious of me, but I gave them my word that we’re just orbiting the black hole. Here’s roughly what a free-fall trajectory into our Kerr black hole would look like (looking down at the hole’s north pole): Inside the ergosphere, you have to rotate with the hole, because traveling anti-spinward would require going faster than the speed of light. But inside the ergosphere, though, they’re being dragged along so fast that, no matter what, they can’t stand still. For spinning ones, there’s a lozenge-shaped region outside the event horizon called the ergosphere (My first-born daughter will be Ergosphere Sullivan). Objects near a rotating hole (or any rotating mass, to a lesser extent) are dragged along with the hole’s rotation. For a non-spinning black hole, there are no stable circular orbits closer than one and a half times the radius of the event horizon (the Schwarzschild radius), because in order to be in a circular orbit any closer, you’d have to travel faster than light. The first difference is that you can get closer to the event horizon of a spinning black hole. We’re still going to die horribly, of course, but hey, at least it’ll be interesting. The spin means this trip is a whole new ballgame.

This black hole, though, is a Kerr black hole: it spins. All the black holes I discussed in the last part were Schwarzschild black holes, meaning they had no spin or electric charge. I was gonna take David Bowie and Abe Lincoln along again, but frankly, I’ve put Bowie through enough, and Lincoln was just so damn grim all the time.Īnyway, back to the subject at hand: the scary monster that is a rapidly-spinning black hole. Captain’s hat and all), and Charlize Theron. This time, the crew will consist of me, Jürgen Prochnow ( Das Boot Jürgen, naturally. It would fit in even a medium-sized living room. That’s the actual command module Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong took to the Moon (minus the Plexiglas shroud, of course). (From the website of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum) The difference is that, this time, I’m going to let the black hole spin (at 98% of the maximum possible spin, which is pretty average for a fast-spinning hole). This time, though, I’m going to restrict myself to a single 1-million-solar-mass black hole. In the previous part of this series, I tried to analyze what it would be like to fly an Apollo Command Module into black holes of various sizes.

Endless sky ships wont folllow through wormhol