From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Sat Jan 15 2000 - 14:32:45 MST
Robert Bradbury writes:
> I think we need some "scientific source" URLs (rather than quotes from papers
> extracted from press releases).
I wasn't talking about supermassive piggies, just vanilla holes of few
solar masses.
I was thought you were aware of
http://spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast14jan_1.htm
In some other paper I've seen estimates of 50-60 Mholes for our galaxy.
Now, I can't estimate the average density from these data. What's the
volume of our galaxy? Are we talking about ~80-100 lightyears on the
average to the next hole, or what?
> Now, what gets interesting is the problem of seeing those black holes.
> Nanoprobes (or even non-nanoprobes) may have a hard time detecting
> them early enough to avoid falling into or being irradiated by them.
> The question is whether you have to have a Chandra-mass telescope to focus
> the incoming X-rays? If so, you are definately no longer a nano-probe.
> So, we have yet another possible problem in the realm of interstellar
> travel (in addition to cosmic radiation and hitting dust particles).
Gravitational microlensing seems like a very elegant technique to me.
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