Star Citizen News - week of Sept 14 2013

[theJaeks]

This week's Wingman's Hangar, Ep 38

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13263-Wingmans-Hangar-Episode-38

 

Funds raised $18.8M

 

Alpha/Beta slots still available, around 22,000

 

 

Some new art was released this week. Overall it's been fairly quiet other than all the speculation on the forums.

 

 

Interesting random factoid I learned this week: From the blog Bad Astronomy by Phil Plait

 

A regular black hole -- that is, one with three times the Sun's mass -- with have an event horizon radius of about 9 km. That means it has a huge density, about two quadrillion grams per cubic cm (2 x 10¹⁵). But double the mass, and the density drops by a factor of four. Put in 10 times the mass and the density drops by a factor of 100. A billion solar mass black hole (big, but we see them this big in galaxy centers) would drop that density by a factor of 1 x 10¹⁸. That would give it a density of roughly 1/1000 of a gram per cc... and that's the density of air!

 

A billion solar mass black hole would have an event horizon 3 billion km in radius -- roughly the distance of Neptune to the Sun.

 

See where I'm going here? If you were to rope off the solar system out past Neptune, enclose it in a giant sphere, and fill it with air, it would be a black hole!

 

That, to me, is by far the oddest thing about black holes. Sure, they warp space, distort time, play with our sense of what's real and isn't... but when they touch on the everyday and screw with that, well, that's what gets me.

 

I first thought of this at a black hole conference at Stanford a few years back. I was walking with noted black hole expert Roger Blandford when it hit me. I did a quick mental calculation to make sure I had the numbers right, and related to Roger that a solar system full of air would be a black hole. He thought about it for a moment and said, "Yes, that sounds about right."