To be fair, is there anyone alive who wouldn't be afraid of a black hole? It's a celestial body so gargantuan its gravity bends the light passing around it like a lens. Anyone who gets too close to one will literally never be seen again, ever.
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They don’t have to be gargantuan (except in terms of mass) - the low end of stellar mass black holes can have radii as small as 6 km.
Many black holes have a bright accretion disk outside their event horizon, so visibility for those is not an issue.
But it’s certainly possible to have maximally scary black holes that have no accretion disk and are small enough so as not to cause significant lensing. You could fly your spaceship straight into one of those without even realizing, until you start turning to spaghetti.
Yeah I remembered the accretion disks immediately after posting and edited the comment.
> it’s certainly possible to have maximally scary black holes that have no accretion disk and are small enough so as not to cause significant lensing
Now that's a proper cosmic horror.
The event horizon might have a circumference as small as 12*Pi km but as I understand it, the radius is infinite. ;)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, and maybe it depends on the type of the black hole, but if you were to fall directly into one, or even enter an orbit too close, you would still be seen - and seen for an extremely long time.
Yes, altho "very long time" doesnt do it justice - while your light would be fading and redshifting, mathematically you could detect photons comming off you the whole remaining age of the universe.
That's... That's even more terrifying.
It really doesn’t take much to bend light.
Supernova and asteroids were always scarier to me because they’re potentially planet-ending scenarios. Whereas a black hole is benign as long as you don’t move into its orbit at too acute an angle.