"In a spherical gradient of tortured space time" is a great title for an ambient or very slow.and moody electronic music album.

Yeah, black holes in media where they are depicted as a giant space vacuum cleaner is a big pet peave of mine. Unless you get really close, nothing is remarkable about the orbital mechanics of a black hole. The equivalent mass star would have burned you up at a much further distance than the gravity starts to become noticeably wonky.

It's a shame that writers focus so much on the gravity and neglect accretion disks and astrophysical jets which do extend large distances and are visually stunning as well.

To be fair I think "light can't escape" thing really just is that wild, it's pretty captivating. The idea of it being the death of a star, one of the most important things to all life we know about, only adds to that sense. Stars are massive billion-year explosions, yes, but they also bring warmth and light and beauty. Black holes are the death of all of that, even if it's not technically more dangerous from the same distance

Big ball of plasma in the center of the solar system that will definitely eventually explode and wipe out anything left alive on any surrounding planet?

The sun isn't heavy enough to go supernova. (Unless it has a companion, but there's no evidence of one so far.)

Pop sci-fi seems to be fond of intermediate-mass black holes (EG Interstellar, Star Trek StrangeNew Worlds), and for something kinda the size of a star, they are "scary."

In other instances (like in TV Foundation), a close orbit to the accretion disk is a source of suspense.

And then there's the "stealth" aspect. Stellar-mass ones and below are very small and (potentially) quiet for something with the mass of a star, eg easy to stumble upon.

And in some very advanced universes (eg the online Orion's Arm), even with "hard" sci fi, swimming through a star's nuclear plasma is totally doable. But a black hole is an impossible boundry of physics, and an particularly extreme object useful for astroengineering.

They are like stars in the sense of orbital mechanics.

But a star can be completely understood by the laws of physics we know. While a black hole breaks our understanding and we have no idea what's going on in there.

It's the fear of the unknown.

Yeah, Azathoth fits the bill in many ways.

If I remember Lovecraft correctly the whole idea was that human mind can't comprehend such things. And black holes fit very nicely.

Also, extremely pedantic note - black holes were predicted by looking at what happens in the math at extreme densities, long before black holes were actually observed in space

There are math models where dividing by zero makes sense. It's just that those models don't suit our world for now.

Well, what exactly is inside the event horizon is unproven because we cannot possibly look. All of the rest of the physics seems to check out, though, and we know that there are things out there that behave just like our models of black holes predict. It's an incomplete understanding rather than a necessarily incorrect one. If it is something else, it'd have to be something that looks more or less exactly like a black hole to an outside observer

Everything was hairy back in the 70's.

But can you comb it all into the same direction?

I think you explain it pretty well, but one thing to add. Due to the General Relativity and thus spacetime it is actually not directions that all point toward the singularity, but as soon as you cross the event horizon all of your future becomes the Singularity, not as a point in space, but a point in time

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-singularities/lightcone.html

This points at that, you would also need to be able to travel faster than light and that would make you time travel backwards in time

Fun fact: the big bang was not a singularity.

It's in the same vein as gamma ray bursts. Could possibly cause problems, but space is so big, so heavily occupied by empty space, that the odds of ever encountering one vs just more empty space is almost infinity:1.

I mean, our planet is billions of years old and hasn't encountered a single one yet, based on the fact it's still comfortably in orbit around the sun.

Asteroids are far, far more concerning. Encountered a bunch of those already.

I remember reading this single page image from the flash where he was talking about how much he did in an atto second.

If that'd be true,nthe flash could create black holes at will or even by accident if he isn't careful

GOOD point

And an infinitely dense point in spacetime doesn't necessarily exist: it's just what general relativity predicts is at the center of a black hole.

The last time our physical model of the universe predicted an infinite value, we ended up discovering new physics eventually (the ultraviolet catastrophe). (Edit: ultrasound was a typo).

Nothing you said about black holes really contradicts what they were saying? Even if a star and black hole can have the same gravity, there is still a shell of space that once you pass you cannot ever return. I'm sure Superman could go into a star and come back out, not so much with a black hole.

I mean, the gravitational gradient is much higher. To me this kind of sounds like saying "there's nothing that special about a 10 watt laser, an LED lightbulb puts out the same amount of light", but a 10 watt laser is enough to instantly and permanently blind you.

Its true that there's nothing that special about orbiting a black hole, but I think its not really logically inconsistent (inasmuch as a superhero can be logically consistent) to say "even if superman could survive dipping into a sun he probably wouldn't be too happy if he stuck his arm into an event horizon".

I knew before coming into the comments there would be a pendatic with this argument

And the superstars sucked into the supermassive

The Beast and his armies shall rise from the pit and make war against God.

We don't need to "live in a simulation" for "our reality to be made of math". Math could very well exist outside of anything, as a formal concept. This is the old debate asking whether math is invented or discovered. If it is discovered, then it can exist without any reality, as a pure abstract concept.

that's the fun part, everything is always falling!

I heard it more like, the fact that our universe is expanding faster than light, means there are parts of the universe we can never reach, even at light speed, which is mathematically identical to the event horizon of a black hole, which not even light can escape from. There's not a singularity at the center of our observable universe, though.