Robert Bradbury <bradbury@genebee.msu.su>
>Perhaps one of our rocket engineers would like to
> comment on how much fuel/energy you would need to correct the deflection
> caused by a 1g nanoprobe coming within a few AU of a standard stellar
> mass black hole?
I'm not a rocket engineer but if our sun were to collapse into a black hole
the orbit of the earth would not change at all. The gravitational field
of a one solar mass black hole would be identical to the sun's until you got
closer than 400,000 miles because that's the current radius of the sun.
As long as it's not sucking in a lot of gas or dust and making a huge flux of
X rays in the process a black hole would not be of much danger to a space
traveler because it's just too small, and if it was eating lots of stuff and started
becoming generally flamboyant then you could easily see it and avoid it.
John K Clark jonkc@att,net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:02:21 MDT