From: GriffJon@mail.utexas.edu (Jon Camfield)
Subject: (urth) Black Holes
Date: Tue, 04 Aug 1998 11:02:56 

(Intro:  'lo, I'm a newbie to the Urth list, but have been catching up with
the archives (slowly) and have been following the recent threads.  My 'nick'
is GriffJon, though my name is Jon Camfield.  I answer to either)

Sean Walen's argument for the sun having a wormhole rather than a black hole
is interesting, and I seem to remember one character describing the
phenomenon as "a worm eating the middle out of the sun" or somesuch, but...
I think he overlooked one part about the black hole.  There is actually some
math to be done which I'm not going to do.  Typhon reported that the Earth's
temperature worldwide dropped .002 the first year that there was the black
hole in the sun.  I think that this would indicate that the sun lost a lot
of it's mass to the black hole, and so we could find the general size of the
hole, ideally.
     But a black hole itself in the middle of the sun, before taking into
account the mass it absorbs from the sun, will increase the gravity of their
combined bodies, possibly enough to draw the planets in closer over time.
     Of course, the problem with this is that Severian understands white-
and black- holes as a kind of gateway into lower and higher universes,
rather than the way we currently see them...  but supposedly they still have
a rather nasty gravity well, they just wouldn't increase due to what they
intake.  This is actually good.  Typhon also said that this drop in
temperatures was unexpectedly fast, and then it stablized.  So, initially,
the black hole+mass of original sun pulled the earth closer but at the same
time cooled the sun down fast (biiiig black hole??) but over time the black
hole had 'eaten it's weight' in sun, and the changes became less noticeable.
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