quote:
Now to the statment that black holes are in the middle of nowhere, not really,
...
they may in fact be in the area of several thousand in the general vacinity of Sol (an estimate I will admit).
Suicide Junkie may I ask where you knowlege of stellar phenomenon is derived?
This is kind of late, but since the thread's resurfaced, and I've noticed that comment, I should respond.
Sirkit, you have almost answered your own question here.
I was not implying that all black holes are "in the middle of nowhere", or denying that there were any near any specific place.
I merely said that the ones that happen to be solitary are hard to detect. If the hole is drifting alone, it will not have an appreciable accretion disk (since there is no nearby source of gas, such as a red giant), and its gravitational influence on its distant neighbours will be minor.
Gravitational lensing would be noticable, but you'd have to be looking right at the hole while stars move behind it.
And yes, I do know that the center of the galaxy is likely a giant black hole, but we were discussing star-scale BHs, so I didn't mention it.
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also time is warped arount the hole this may affect how quickly the crew of a ship can respond and how quickly the signal they transmit will reach the general empire
Sure, a little bit, but even if your black hole was large enough that you could survive the gravitational shear past the event horizon, the delay would only become noticable to humans (fractions of a second) when the ship is less than a few seconds from the event horizon. (eg. from aBHoT)
More important would probably be the fact that the message would take decades to reach home without using the Warppoint you arrived from.
Most of my info in this thread came from "A brief history of time" - S. Hawking (some good blackhole stuff & I belive I quoted it somewhere below), or "Scientific American" magazine for general ideas.