History Main / UnrealisticBlackHole

Also black holes are often shown as swirling masses that visibly suck everything around them toward them like a giant drain or tornado. Sometimes it is a directional tornado shaped funnel. Well they have to look like somthing.

* The Doctor Who episode "The Impossible Planet". A planet orbiting a black hole? Why, that's impossible! It would get sucked in! What's especially painful is that the titular planet would appear to be embedded within the hole's accretion disc; it could be fixed with a change in wind direction and a couple of rewritten lines of dialogue, so that the planet manages to continue ''hovering'' over the hole, without orbiting as part of (and eventually getting ground up by) the accretion disc, and without being sandblasted out of existence by the wind. And this is a series that was originally conceived as being educational.
** I thought this might pop up. With the exception of the planet, the black hole itself seems to function as a black hole would. The planet's the trick of the thing, being suspended in place by a species using power and technology more ancient than the man flying the blue box 'round the cosmos to incarcerate ultimate evil. So, the planet's impossible. Is there an...unrealistic planet trope?
*** The planet isn't necessarily unrealistic either. It's perfectly possible for a planet to circle around a black hole without falling in just as well as it can circle around a star and not fall.
*** To further explain, a black hole doesn't have any more or less gravity than the collapsing body that created it, so if there were planets circling a star that became a black hole, those planets would continue to circle said star unaffected until such time as the hole took in enough matter to increase its gravity. The danger of a black hole is that the entire gravitational pull of that star is now collapsed into a single point, so anything getting close gets hit with all of it at once, but you have to be within the original circumference of the collapsing body for that to make much of a difference.
** I'd like to point out that the episode -is- called "Impossible Planet" and the fact that it was surviving near a Black Hole at all was the core plot of the episode...
*** Yes, but the point of this argument is that ''it is NOT impossible'' for a planet to orbit a black hole!
** I think this has been said on another page: the black hole was clearly growing in size/mass/gravity or whatever, so it was 'impossible' for the planet to orbit the black hole without falling in. It was positioned right in front of it for flip sake!

-->'''Martin Llyod''': Yes.

*** [[http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0810/0810.5515.pdf Two]] [[http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/anthropicshadow.pdf papers]] which partly address this issue.

*** The risk may however be [[http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0810/0810.5515.pdf higher]] than most would admit.

*** The risk may however be [[http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0810/0810.5515.pdf higher]] than most would admit.
**** Yeah, no. LHC doesn't do anything that doesn't occur naturally in nature. If black holes aren't popping spontaneously into existence, it won't be happening inside the Hadron Collider, either.
**** I am already aware of this. Please the article before making a snide comment.

*** Exactly right. Cosmic rays have been bombarding the Earth's upper atmosphere with far more energy than the LHC is capable of generating for billions of years, and no planet-destroying black holes have yet been spontaneously generated. Also - what's key with a black hole isn't just the ''mass'', but the ''density'' (i.e., the amount of mass in a given volume). Theoretically you can make a black hole out of a sugar cube if you squeeze it hard enough, though the black hole would be ''tiny''; a black hole made out of the combined mass/energy of a few subatomic particles is utterly negligible.

* MegaMan gets a weapon that generates blackholes in ''Mega Man 9''. If those were real black holes, then Earth would get destroyed.

** MegaManX 8 has the Gravity Well weapon, obtainable from gravity Antonion, who has gravity itself at his command. It creates a slowly-moving black hole that pulls in smaller enemies and can break through crystals, especially those created by Earthrock Trilobite.

* ''SuperMario Galaxy''. [[spoiler:Bowser's plans go bust, one of his stars collapses and turns into a black hole, universe gets sucked in? Disregarding the fact that it's actually possible to ''fight inside'' said star without dying painfully, black holes... just don't work that way.]] Of course, the reason I didn't think of this while playing the game was the fact that it's ''[[RuleOfCool completely freaking awesome.]]''
** And let's not forget the black holes that function as bottomless pits for each level. Pretty much the only realistic part of them is that they suck.

* The 2009 ''Film/StarTrek''. Not only do characters travel through a black hole to another universe and another time, they [[spoiler:escape its pull after they cross the event horizon (though they ''do'' have faster-than-light technology)]]. What the writers really wanted was a wormhole, especially if they were just going to make up the science.

* Let it be very important to remember that, no matter what else we know of a black whole, ALL OF THAT is out the window once you cross the event horizon, and after that, all bets are off. So far, no one has been able to produce a satisfactory theory on what happens then (Though the hypothesis' are many). It is for this reason that black holes actually still fit this trope in RealLife physics to this day. Short of sending someone through one, and them somehow surviving it, and then impossibly returning or sending information back, we don't know, and never will know, what happens inside.

***The risk may however be [[http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0810/0810.5515.pdf higher]] than most would admit.

* Let it be very important to remember that, no matter what else we know of a black whole, ALL OF THAT is out the window once you cross the event horizon, and after that, all bets are off. So far, no one has been able to produce a satisfactory theory on what happens then (Though the hypothesis' are many). It is for this reason that black holes actually still fit this trope in RealLife physics to this day. Short of sending someone through one, and them somehow surviving it, and then impossibly returning or sending information back, we don't know, and never will know, what happens inside.

** Some scientists are even arguing that the modern concept of black hole is in itself unrealistic, as it's possible that a perfect singularity cannot exist in the time-space continuum as we know it. If that is the case, then the black holes should more accurately be called dark stars (which admittedly sounds even cooler, but has less strange effects to mess with our minds).

Also black holes are often shown as swirling masses that visibly suck everything around them toward them like a giant drain or tornado. Sometimes it is a directional tornado shaped funnel.

**Interestingly, in ''The Andalite Chronicles'' also has the protagonist get sucked into a black hole, though he manages to escape using [[spoiler:the Time Matrix]].