I’ve seen several articles commenting the fact that for the last 5 MY or so, the solar system has been traversing the so called “local bubble“:The obvious explanation of this structure is a supernova remnant, something similar to the Crab nebula, only bigger; orders of magnitude bigger, in fact:

The thing I personally find puzzling is that absolutely nobody mentioned the first thing that crossed my mind when I found out about this. You see, when you see a structure that has a stellar nursery on its gaseous outer perimeter, and empty space inside the perimeter, the first thing that comes to mind is to expect at least one black hole somewhere in the center of this structure; more precisely, there have probably been several supernovae of the population 2 stars in the center of this, and considering how big the structure is, I would expect them to have produced black holes, rather than neutron stars, and we are going right through this area.

Is this a danger? That’s hard to tell, but a black hole is not more dangerous than an ordinary star of its mass; it doesn’t just go around and suck things in. You need to get fairly close, and then the most likely outcome would be the disruption of the Oort cloud, with the likely result of multiple intrusions of comets into the inner solar system, and in the worst case, if we pass really close, it can disrupt the solar system, or cause the Sun to start misbehaving quite dramatically due to tidal effects, which could create extreme coronal mass ejections. As I said, it’s hard to tell – it all depends on how close we are to something we won’t necessarily even see unless we get dangerously close; if you can see it producing relativistic distortions of space on the night sky, you are basically fucked. It’s a very old black hole, and probably not of the kind that advertises itself by chewing up new matter and producing lots of radiation along its axis of rotation, or we would have seen it on a radio telescope by now. What is basically certain is that there is at least one, it is expected to be around the center of the local bubble, and we are basically there.

However, considering how big this structure is, we could miss it by a parsec or so, which is the distance to Alpha Centauri, and relative to this structure’s size I would still say we’re basically right on top of it, and it wouldn’t affect us at all, so it is what it is.