Grrl Power #1432 – Dead leg
Sure, an actual Black Hole can probably absorb a lot of energy before it destabilizes. In fact, as far as I know, they can absorb an unlimited amount of energy. I allow for some wiggle room there because maybe if 6,000 pulsars were somehow aimed at a black hole, (you know, the energy jets that come off of pulsars that emit 100,000 times the energy of our sun,) so if that much energy hit one all at once, maybe that could fuck it up. Probably not, but two black holes nearly hitting each other has to have an effect. Maybe a huge black hole can rip a little one to bits and invert its event horizon? I don’t know.
But the pixie’s singularity spell isn’t a true black hole. It’s limited by the magic used to create it, and it was actually designed to suck up a lot of shit, hold it for a few seconds, then barf it all back out once the pixie had relocated either it or herself. Maxima figured if that was the case, then disrupting the containment might light it off early. And she didn’t even have to use her own energy beam.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Two black holes colliding make… one black hole.
Black hole + *anything* else = bigger black hole.
The only hypothetical exception would be negative-mass matter, which we are pretty certain does not exist. It would be *stuff* that some how literally weighs less than nothing, and would behave in very odd ways.
Black holes emit radiation, and the smaller they are, the faster that radiation emission is. If the fairy can produce a BH that is just small enough to go under critical mass when it hits the target, that would be a massive explosion without resulting in a larger black hole.
A black hole that unstable would be immensely small, and it wouldn’t suck up basically anything. A black hole with a lifetime of 10 seconds would weigh “only” about a 100 tons and a Schwarzchils radius (event horizon) much, much smaller than an atom (~10^-22 meters). You can have a perfect bomb, or you can have something that sucks matter and exerts gravity, but you can’t have both.
Right. I was going for the bomb.
When a just-barely-stable BH hits a target, it would just absorb more mass and become bigger and more stable. You can’t get a black hole to explode. It either evaporates, or it gets bigger.
That evaporation is radiation, and among other things, radiation has pressure, in addition to effing up your DNA (or what ever you might have). The smaller the hole is, the faster it radiates, and that IS effectively a bomb. In this arena though, you’re in the blast radius too. Also fun fact: *you get absorbed either way (unless you get torn to shreds by the radiation)*, and you just turn to radiation.
BTW, ALL black holes radiate. Big ones just radiate slowly. See Hawking radiation.
Technically, so far NO black holes radiate (except hypothetical primordial black holes). Any black hole more than 20 billionths the mass of our sun (61 micron diameter) is absorbing the background radiation of the universe and therefore growing.
A black hole the size of the one the fairy threw would be several dozen Earth masses. It would completely disrupt the structural integrity of the planet and any moons it has, immediately crushing and consuming both. Also it would take orders of magnitude longer than the universe has existed up to this point for it to evaporate away from Hawking Radiation.
Ergo: it’s not a true black hole. It’s a magic fairy created “black hole”, or a black hole that’s been modified with fairy magic to only affect what it touches.
Maybe it’s a portal and the other end is inside the Event Horizon of an actual black hole. Like that episode of Stargate SG1 where a gate dialed in to Earth just as the planet it was on passed the EH.
Well, the process of the two black holes merging creates gravity waves, so Dave was right that it has an effect.
Negative mass is a weird concept. Would it move AWAY from gravity wells?
Not according to Stephen Hawking.
His theory has it that you get two particles constantly being created and neutralised, one with positive mass one with negative.
When near a Black Hole they the positive mass one can escape, creating Hawking Radiation, because the negative mass one is sucked into the Black Hole and slowly eroding/evaporating it.
Eventually enough negative mass is absorbed to end the Black Hole, and then I’m not sure anyone knows what will happen.
So that’s the mostly-wrong explanation that’s easy to understand (and it’s virtual particle/antiparticle pairs, which essentially borrow energy from the vacuum in order to “exist”, and one falls into the black hole and pays back the energy debt by allowing its partner to become a real particle, or something, which reduces the total energy in the black hole; although virtual particles are widely regarded as little more than a mathematical trick that only works because we physically can’t know what’s going on at sufficiently small time, mass, and distance scales). The real explanation (which I do not really understand) involves the event horizon limiting the range of possible wave forms that can exist in the neighborhood of a black hole, kind of like the Casimir effect, which results in photons being generated near it as a form of thermal black-body radiation, and the wavelength of the photons is proportional to the radius of the black hole (thus smaller black holes generate shorter-wavelength, higher-energy photons and radiate heat faster).
I do not fully understand it either, but was under two other impressions:
Black holes have charge and spin as well as mass. Positively charged particles (like positrons) would be attracted to the magnetic field of a negatively-charged black hole whereas negatively charged particles (like electrons) would be repelled from the magnetic field. Although both are attracted by the gravitational field, the negatively-charged electron (generated along with its positron antiparticle) would be much more likely to escape. The more ridiculous the charge of a black hole (see also: magnetars) the faster it emits energy.
The second impression is a lot more woolly. I remember that the Ultraviolet Catastrophe had something to do with it – essentially you can’t have photons that carry less than one “quantum packet” of energy, which is why black-body radiation doesn’t exist past the far-ultraviolet range. And there was something about tiny virtual particles having insufficient amplitude and frequency too high for their mass to produce photons and therefore retaining sufficient energy to escape instead of being subject to orbital decay near the event horizon?
Both of which are also probably wrong. High school science was a long time ago and however enthusiastic our teacher was about astrophysics I sure as heck don’t use this knowledge in my daily life. So probably I don’t remember it all accurately. I’d have to break out an old printed textbook and look it up.
Black holes can have charge in principle, but a charged black hole will naturally tend to neutralize itself because the charge increases its ability to capture oppositely-charged particles and decreases its ability to capture like-charged particles. In practice a black hole with non-negligible charge should not arise naturally. (In theory if you were to charge a black hole enough you’d get a naked singularity due to strong electromagnetic effects, but it’s probably not physically possible to charge a black hole that much even if you’re deliberately shooting electrons at it as hard as you can.)
There’s a similar effect with spin, where sufficient angular momentum should prevent the event horizon (due to frame-dragging effects) but probably can’t physically be imparted to a black hole. However, black holes do generally form with significant angular momentum, far more than they would tend to lose in any reasonable amount of time through interactions with other matter.
Aaalmost right. Careful with magnetic fields: They don’t do work on electrical charges, only torque theiir paths, i.e. magnets don’t attract or repulse positive or negative electrical charged particles, only bend their paths rightturn-southup-(+)forward or leftturn-southup-(-)forward (germanic languages are surprisingly inadequate to distinguish chirality in 3D). if particle and magret are moving relative to another. Look up Lorentz-Force and Einstein’s Special Relativity. In 1st approximation. Ignoring the particles intrinsic spin or quantization. in the classical γ≈1 limit… Soooo, visualize (-) going riiight screw pathways and (+) left screw paths, from north to south magnetic pole. Curly helixes, you know. For historical reasons, earth’s geographic north pole is itself a magnetic south pole, natch. Unconfused? Sorries, teaching physics is hard work
No, Hawking never predicted negative mass, and Hawking radiation isn’t about mass, it’s about a particle and its antimatter equivalent. Not even antimatter has negative mass. It just has opposite charge but positive mass.
If something had negative mass, it would be attracted to other negative mass, but it should be repelled by positive mass.
No, there’s no negative mass particle. There’s a particle and its anti-particle, but antimatter still has positive mass. That’s how black holes lose mass.
They may exist the same way that virtual particles exist. As in, created with their unique anti-particle and existing on a planck-time scale.
And while scientists are rather certain that negative mass does not exist in our universe (the part that we can see of it), as it would produce quite distinct effects. That is not the same as stating with confidence that it cannot exist. Mass after all is caused by the interaction of certain particles with the higgs-field, created by the higgs-boson. We know that our fundamental model is yet incomplete so it cannot be ruled out that the higgs boson has its own anti-particle, which would produce an inverted higgs-field.
It is not at all likely, but it cannot entirely be ruled out either.
Higgs bosons don’t create the Higgs field; it’s actually the other way around. Higgs bosons are excitations (regions of higher energy) of the Higgs field, just as all particles are excitations of their relevant quantum fields.
Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding
Was just about to comment this.
Stuff that goes into a black hole just makes a bigger black hole, yeah, but stuff smacking into the accretion disk can get pretty energetic.
Merging black holes is how you get monsters like Ton 618 and Phoenix A*
With up to 100 billion solar masses captured in their event horizons.
That is a third or so of the weight of our entire galaxy, and more than most of our companion galaxies.
Black holes of less mass than a good sized asteroid aren’t stable. The smaller they are, the more Hawking radiation they emit until they convert entirely into (end result) gamma rays. Really really quickly. Like nuclear explosion quickly.
It’s possible, in theory, to create energy based black holes with high power lasers and parabolic reflectors, and inject atoms, then turn off the lasers and get 100% matter to energy output. Which is totally theory at this point.
Well, yes, that is true according to the currently most accepted models of black holes, but it is worth mentioning that there is no observational evidence that hawking radiation actually exists. It seems likely that hawking does exist, but until we have observational evidence (or direct experimental evidence) it remains a prediction.
Hawking certainly existed ;)
He also is the only evidence necessary for why we need a NHS.
Had he been born in almost any other country he would not have lived even to the age the doctors initially gave him and we would not have the privilege of learning from one of the most brilliant and consequential scientists ever.
Haking existed, but did he radiate? (Likewise ;))
I don’t know if anyone ever checked, but he almost certainly radiated in the infrared spectrum.
Really? Even in a discussion about black holes?
There’s no escaping the current-events horizon.
when navigating the current-events horizon, the trick is to get more light than heat
The frequency and density of Hawking radiation are inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. The radiation from a stellar mass black hole would be a small amount of extremely long radio waves, in the range of kilometres. For the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, we are talking about very few photons with wavelengths on par with the size of the solar system. That would be very difficult to detect with current equipment. So far, we are only beginning to be able to detect when two of those big boys merge, emitting several solar masses as gravitational energy.
Given that observing Hawking Radiation requires a not spinning black hole that is in absolute vacuum with nothing infalling and of low enough mass that it has a lifetime measured in hundreds of years rather than billions, I’m not holding my breath waiting for the direct observation. Only chance I’d see in the short term would be if large numbers of low mass black holes were formed in the early universe, got scattered randomly and we happen to start observing sudden flashes of radiation we can’t explain otherwise with Keck or other truly large telescopes.
However, it is the best model we have at this time, as far as I can tell.
One of the “magic physics tricks” I’ve imagined for isekai character learning magic: “Breaking” your usual pocket dimension that is normally used to store various goods: Load a nice rock into dimensional pocket and redefine internal volume of the pocket to zero. Then release the rock. Micro-blackhole instantly evaporates in Hawking radiation with about 21.5 megatons of boom per kilogram.
Intended to be used as a city-killer demolition charge.
But you’ld probably lose your item box.
the matter falling into the black hole also gives off a ton of energy as it gets ripped apart, much of which escapes. It’s actually a proposed energy source for civilations after the stars die out.
Anybody else thinking Maxima is having far too much fun?
Maxima does not have too much fun.
Not does she have too little.
She has exactly as much fun as she means to,
:raises_hand:
Maxi hasn’t had a good workout since she drank that geode-juice
Like Soupcan when he got to fight Darkseid: no more concern about tissue paper (except what will be needed to wipe up what is left)
Now I can’t stop thinking about a non-existent comic series called, “The adventures of Soupcan and Barfbag” with Wonder Bread, The Flashlight, Martian Can-Opener, and so-forth.
Green Flashlight?
No, no: it’s The Flashlight and The Green Lampstand.
Don’t forget Pink Fleshlight
i was at a loss for green lantern but you nailed it. the lampstand corps.
She can probably count on the fingers of one hand the times she’s been allowed to go “all out no-stop”without worrying about collateral damage before this.
Two black holes colliding results in one single black hole, and also a nice gravitational wave as a result. There were experiments set to detect just that, and they did. Ever since 2015, LIGO (US), VIRGO (EU), and KAGRA (Japan) have detected a black hole collision every three days on average. These detectors have confirmed predictions about black holes made by Einstein and Hawking.
Two black holes colliding make one black hole. The area of the event horizon of the created black hole is the sum of the areas of the event horizons of the two black holes that collided. From that you can calculate the mass of the resulting black hole.
The short version: the black hole created in the collision has more mass than either of the original two but less mass than the sum of the masses of the original two. The rest of the mass (which can be hundreds of solar masses in some cases) is converted into energy and released in an impulse of gravity waves during the collision. If you’re anywhere within a few hundred AU of an event like that the gravity wave will reduce you to fine paste or just elementary particles, speeding away from the event.
I’m doubtful of the destructive capability of gravitational waves
Even extremely low interaction rates can be a problem if there’s enough energy involved (a supernova produces enough neutrino flux to be fatal at dozens of AU), and black hole collisions are way more energetic than that. But in any case, fairy thing is clearly “thing that is black and a hole… but basically unrelated to actual black holes”.
If you throw too much stuff into a black hole the stuff right around the event horizon starts generating so much radiation it blows away everything around it. This is the Eddington limit. This does not actually do anything at all to the black hole, it only limits the rate at which it can grow.
if you tossed an open bag of holding into a black hole, would the result be an inverted bag of holding, or a bag of black hole-ing?
Came for the comic, stayed for the physics
Specially the jiggly-physics ;)
Well there you go. Krav maga becomes exponentially effective against bigger targets.
Hehe entire hole Sucked.
Great effects here *Cheering.
Thank you Dave B., for getting back to the action, I know you find it challenging to draw.
And I believe everyone else appreciates it too.
This tournament arc just begs for super-power scenes!
So Dave, are you prescient or reading far more than you are admitting?
‘Impossible’ Particle That Crashed into Earth With 100,000 Times the Energy of the LHC May Actually Be from an Exploding Black Hole.
https://www.zmescience.com/space/neutrino-2023-event-exploding-black-hole/
And you even go the colors pretty close:
https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/unwatermarked_Gemini_Generated_Image_2lx0b72lx0b72lx0-1024×559.jpg
Right? I love how particle beams tend to be violet. Makes them both more science-y AND breaks the expectation of “Masculine power signatures”.
I do believe I already mentioned the cure for being in the room with the target (deuterium) when the accelerator burns a hole in it? (After turning it off, looking over the shield and saying “Whoops!)
Even funnier is that up to about a century ago *the* masculine colour was red, with pinks being reserved for boys, while women got to wear blue, and girls the light and pastel blues.
That started changing when feminists of the time deliberately started wearing red (*).
And then Disney happened.
(* it actually is a lot more complicated than that, but this is the gist of it)
Uhg, don’t get me going on the whole men no longer being cock robin exploding colours all thanks to some english goth wannabe dandy. I used a plasma welder to remove that wankers name from my brain…had to give up my first trip to WPAB museum AND Smithsonian Air&Space in 1976. Worth it.
Alternate title for this strip: “Onomatopoeia-palooza”
When I was a kid, giving someone a flat tire meant stepping on the back of their shoe so their shoe would come off. Not kicking someone in the knee and ripping their leg off. Dave must have gone to a much rougher elementary school.
Or you went to a softer one.
As Peggy said way back in #216 (https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-216-50-caliber-headache/):
“There are a lot of superpowers that make bullets mostly just annoying.”
Or in this case, a severed robot leg.
i knew it was not a blackhole!
A blackhole that size, exploding, would obliterate the moon! not make a small nuclear explosion!
HA!
Did ya hear about the black hole that exploded?
Not the start of a joke, it was on the news recently
Tinman: “And that was my good leg!”
That wasn’t a real black hole or there wouldn’t have been anyone left in the battlefield. Her magic created a simulation of one and all that beams’ energy over-loaded it. It’s like when someone jams a water bottle over a faucet and turns the water on, sooner or later the bottle explodes. It’s not much different from “suck-hole’s” version, only way more powerful. I think Max would be the only one that might resist a real black hole, but that’s a big maybe.
So it was in fact the artificial singularity like a Romulan Warbird engine core. If Sydney wasn’t so… distracted at the moment, she’d probably have figured that out.
Maxima, being a closet NEEEEEERRRD, is probably thinking that in her internal monologue though.
Good reference, I was racking my brain for one myself, I had forgotten the Romulan drive.
If Maxima’s actually able to resist a real black hole (and I’m just talking resist being spaghettified near the thing, not resist falling in once past the event horizon,) then we’re gonna need to upgrade her power classification.
No one really knows what her limits are and when she fought suck-hole, she felt the effects at first. I’m just thinking with her speed and shield she might be able to get some distance before crossing the event horizon. He did do a weaker version of that fairy’s black hole and once she had switch her power settings even her boobs perked back up.
Ah the classic bullying until they lose a limb. Waiting for the galactic wedgie that splits someone in 2 next.
Somehow this giant mech did a 180° turn in Panel 6? Or at least a 90° turn.
And is now using the arm that was bent to block.
Assuming it’s facing us, Max bent the left arm in panels 1 & 4. It’s released in 5, but still bent. The shield is from the right arm in panels 4 & 5.
It probably was not a true black hole, but just a spherical gravity gradient high enough to keep photons in.
To pinch a phrase from Hiro waaaay back at the news media demo, “Holy goddamn, boss.”
It looks like there is a figure at 11 o’clock relative to the suckhole in panel 3. The fairy or the grey?
Max must be having the time of her life. You can’t fight this reckless in a populated city.
Or a populated planet!
There is another way, perhaps, to destroy a black hole, but perhaps not the largest ones.Some universes expand, run out of steam,and then contract again, this being ‘the big crunch’. When the universe contracts to a point (not a precise description) all but really large black holes allegedly do not survive the experience. Then the universe bounces and the cycle begins again. There are claims that the really big ones from prior tot he recent big crunch left traces that can be observed.
Surprised that there have been no Mom jokes…
So, per Dave, it’s not a black hole but a thingy that sucks in matter and energy then releases it all at once. Referring to Sydney’s “v’orb’cabulary”, that could initially make it a “suck-orb” which then turns into a “blow-orb”. Or maybe “suck-hole/blow-hole”.
I forget, is this a deathmatch?
No, but the powerlevel is so high that accidents happen.
Combattants are expected to be able to withstand the level of damage seen so far.
Which to be fair, they did.
Well, not intentionally. Supposedly.
Won’t comment on magic black holes, but non-magic black holes won’t destabilize because you added a lot of energy into it. Just the opposite. The more you add to a black hole, the bigger* it gets. Black holes evaporate, slowly, through Hawking radiation, as energy randomly quantum-tunnels out of the event horizon. (At least, that’s the model. The expected radiation output is too low to be detected by our current instruments.) The bigger* the black hole, the slower it evaporates, as a larger event horizon means that random quantum tunneling is more likely to emerge still within the event horizon. (Though I think maybe it doesn’t count as quantum tunneling if it doesn’t escape the event horizon?) That means that big* black holes evaporate very slowly, and small* black holes evaporate relatively quickly. Eventually the black hole shrinks to below the critical mass required to maintain an event horizon, and all remaining energy gets released all at once.
In other words, adding energy to a black hole stabilizes rather than destabilizes it. It’s a bit like adding more and more heat to a glowing-hot brand of iron and wondering how much heat it would take for it to stop glowing (and ignore, for the sake of the metaphor, the possibility of adding enough heat to the iron that the entire thing disintegrates). NOT adding energy to a black hole is what destabilizes it.
* measured by gravitational pull and/or event horizon, as the black hole itself is exactly 0 cubic meters in size… supposedly… I mean it’s not like we’ve ever gone inside one with a tape measure to check.
Also, the first panel says “meanwhile, a few seconds earlier”, so I think that means that time dilatation is being accurately portrayed.
(Disclaimer: It does not, in fact, mean this.)
That’s a pretty good “Arrow to the Knee” joke….
I thought so, an actual black hole with an event horizon that large would tear apart the planet with it’s gravity
Strictly speaking, in physics, energy is the ability to do work. However, energy also is equivalent to mass. So if you could somehow add energy to a black hole, it would absorb it as mass. This would not destabilize it, but rather stabilize it.
A black hole the size of the one depicted here would have several dozen Earth masses. The fact that it is not immediately absorbing everything in the area means it’s not really a black hole in the way physics means, and therefore it can obey any rules about energy being able to destabilize it without getting a “well ackshually” from any physics pedant who understands that it was created by a literal freaking fairy.
Maxima completely stole the “Flat Tire” pose from Math. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-209-dramatic-speed-lines-ensue/
Kinda, except Math was playing pocket-billiards at the time
“Overly eventful horizon”
For some reason I find that line absolutely hilarious. XD
Oh hey it’s the fight the comic has been building up to for almost an ENTIRE YEAR. Can we be done with the peanut gallery for at least he next 7-8 pages?
There’s something about “overly eventful horizon” that just cracks me up. Nice one! :D
Me watching comments and sitting on a set of papers designed to answer questions on internal structure of black holes awaiting peer review.
Offers cans of “Non Singularity Black Hole”…. With the slogan “offering densest calorie hit this side of Grand Rapids (GR)
Do you mean the infinite gravitational dip, or the ring of a rotation Kerr black hole? I’m on a diet.
Infinite gravitational dip is an extrapolation and may not reflect reality on your universe. Please consult your physician to see if Energy Conservation in presence of large masses is right for you.
Side effects may include reversal of space, spagettification , and watching the universe die did to time dilation.
NO.
That whole montage was just………
NO.
Sorry… that one DNC.
Came up with a business idea for people living in California.
Buy a grease truck, get paid to collect grease. Then turn the grease into biodiesel and sell it to hippies for $2 more than the regular price.
Wink-Wink Bio-Diesel For novelty purposes only
Although this can be used to fuel a diesel engine, due to state regulations this product is not allowed to be poured into your gas tank to run your vehicle. So remember, this is for novelty purposes only.
how would kicking a giant mechanoid entity in the leg hard enough to break it in half make a “flat tire” sound effect? doesn’t a flat tire hiss when it deflates? surely this scenario would be more of a “crunch”
This isn’t letting a tire go but the sound it makes if you continue to drive on it after it has gone flat
Never heard of a ‘flat tire’ in this context before, butt enough people have posted what it means (do know what a ‘dead leg’ is: basically when someone hits it hard enough to make it go numb)
It may be a regional thing. In my experience a “dead leg” is the act of catching someone standing with their knees locked. It only takes a light bump on the back of the knee to knock it out of its over center position with the result that the effected leg is no longer supporting the bodies weight. Hilarity ensues. Or maybe a fight. YMMV.
Sounds like the same result, just different cause
Was initially thinking of a ‘charlie horse’, but that’s different (and a real pain in the thigh… literally)