Player Characters discover a billion ton black hole

[Tom Kalbfus]

Lets suppose some player characters in a scout ship discover a planet with a billion ton black hole orbiting it. Is it worth anything? What can the players do with it? Lets say for instance there is a planet with a ring system, and there is a gap in the ring system and in that gap is a very small black hole, it suck matter into it from the rings and releases energy. Would this be a problem or an opportunity?

 

[Reynard]

I'm assuming you are referring to mass rather than displacement. A small black hole has a mass 10 times the sun, about 2.2 x 10^ 27 more massive than yours. There's a possibility a star need only a mass of about 1.5 solar masses to go black hole for 3.3 x 10^18 larger than your black hole. Mini black hole are hypothetical so far. Even a mini black hole would be tearing a planet apart unless at a far orbit and would most likely sweep any ring system away.

What would a scout ship crew to with it? report it and leave it alone.

 

[fusor]

I'm assuming you are referring to mass rather than displacement. A small black hole has a mass 10 times the sun, about 2.2 x 10^ 27 more massive than yours. There's a possibility a star need only a mass of about 1.5 solar masses to go black hole for 3.3 x 10^18 larger than your black hole. Mini black hole are hypothetical so far. Even a mini black hole would be tearing a planet apart unless at a far orbit and would most likely sweep any ring system away.

What would a scout ship crew to with it? report it and leave it alone.

Asteroid/mountain-mass black holes are theoretically possible, but they'd be formed around the time of the big bang. Whether any would survive til today (they evaporate over time) is another matter though - apparently a black hole with a mass of 100 billion kg would be finishing its evaporation around now if it formed at the Big Bang, so it'd probably have to be more massive than that (even a PBH with a mass of 10^15 kg is still only about the same mass as a small asteroid/shepherd moon) to survive for as long as the current age of the universe - but it'd be microscopic in size (the event horizon would be about the size of an atomic nucleus).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_black_hole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole

As to what to do with it, they'd probably just establish a base orbiting it to study it. There's not much else that you can do with it really.

 

[alex_greene]

If the planet had a ring, the micro black hole would probably have just settled into orbit a few days before, and the ring would be starting to disperse. There'd be literally nothing about the black hole, except perhaps that the system is particularly prone to Misjumps - possibly due to gravimetric interference from this thing as it approached from the system's Oort cloud.

There'd have been a rash of comet sightings in the 300-400 years since the black hole appeared in the system, too, due to the extreme gravity's effect on local comets in the system's Kuiper Belt.

The black hole might not even be a permanent resident - just passing through, wreaking havoc on the way and leaving behind a very different star system.

 

[fusor]

If the planet had a ring, the micro black hole would probably have just settled into orbit a few days before, and the ring would be starting to disperse. There'd be literally nothing about the black hole, except perhaps that the system is particularly prone to Misjumps - possibly due to gravimetric interference from this thing as it approached from the system's Oort cloud.

There'd have been a rash of comet sightings in the 300-400 years since the black hole appeared in the system, too, due to the extreme gravity's effect on local comets in the system's Kuiper Belt.

Totally wrong. There's no "extreme gravity" here.

There'd be no more misjumps than there would for any other tiny asteroidal shepherd satellite - i.e. none at all. It's only something the mass of an asteroid that's a few km across, collapsed into a black hole. It wouldn't cause any noticeable disturbances at all beyond its immediate surroundings in the ring system (where it'd act exactly like an asteroidal shepherd satellite). And the 100D limit wouldn't even be the size of a hydrogen atom!