The Rogue Intruder

Chapter 1: The Discovery Wednesday, October 25, 2147 – It’s mid-afternoon and Dr. Timothy Grey, an Astrophysicist, Director of Physics at Stanford University, is near the end of a discussion of his Nobel Prize winning theory on rogue black holes to a class of astrophysics students. He is tall with brown wavy hair, athletic, and considered handsome by many of his female students and colleagues. He is a natural leader yet humble and generally reserved. Consequently, his classes are very popular. While Tim was sitting on the front of his desk he told his class, “There may be thousands, possibly millions, of rogue black holes roaming the Milky Way Galaxy. Many of these may be left over from the pre-Milky Way era when only dwarf galaxies existed. When many of these small galaxies merged, some of the smaller black holes were ejected into interstellar space.” Sally Landis asked, “What are some of the reasons these rogue black holes would be ejected?” Tim said, “One reason is where black holes of enormously different sizes are trying to merge except that the smaller one may bounce off the edge of the massive black hole’s gravitational pull and consequently, is thrown into interstellar space making it a rogue. If it skips on the edge of the larger black hole’s gravitational pull with the direction of its rotation, it can be kicked out at velocities as high one million miles an hour.” He went on, “However, the only possible danger is that a nomadic black hole could go undetected and pass near enough to the Oort cloud causing some of these icy objects to be thrown in all directions including toward Earth. If one of the larger objects were to hit Earth, it could ruin our whole weekend.” They laughed. Tim continued, “Nevertheless, I can’t imagine the horrific consequences of that. Still, it’s possible to see one coming. As it starts to devour objects in its path, the stellar debris will start to form a glowing accretion disk and it will start to emit x-rays.” At that statement, the class started to murmur to themselves. Richard Dux asked, “What are the chances this could happen?” A few of the students voiced the same concerns. Tim said, “There is an extremely small chance, a probability of 1 in 10 quadrillion chance, that a rogue black hole could come close enough to pose a danger to our solar system. However, with that said, a rogue black hole without any telltale signs to expose its presence, can be detected by a ‘lensing’ effect that we can observe around massive stellar objects, such as extremely large stars or other black holes. If you remember in the astronomy class all of you should have taken before this class, these massive objects act like lenses, where light from the background stars is bent around them making it appear in a different place from where it actually is. It is much like looking through the clear bottom of a glass at a picture of the stars and they appear to bend around the edges. Even if one of these rogue black holes approached our solar system, we could still detect it coming in one way or another. It’s much like the predictions of Yellowstone erupting. It probably will not happen in our lifetimes.” After a few more questions, the Unicom timer softly chimed, Tim said, “Well, I’m through boring you, confusing you, or both so hang around if you have any other questions or comments. And remember, Unicom recorded this class period so if you missed anything you can review it later.” At that same time, on a small peat farm in Udmurtia, a 19-year-old Russian amateur astronomer, Vladimir Komarov, took a photograph of an area of a star field and noticed that some stars were missing and others had seemingly moved from where they were in a photograph of that same star field he took a few days ago. “This can’t be.” he thought. “There must be something wrong with my telescope, with my photographic equipment, or with my Unicom link.” He decided to examine and test everything then he’ll take another measurement. Unfortunately, he could not examine and test his equipment because he had to work in four hours on his family’s peat farm and by now, it was 2 a.m. and he was tired and getting sleepy. Besides, he does not want to let the family down by not doing his share of the work.