Black Hole

Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XL.

How many black holes are there in Poul Anderson's works? I could try to remember but sometimes I fall back on the memories of blog readers.

After the sixth jump, Chinook is near the dark dust clouds that have always concealed the galactic core. The T machine and its large ellipsoidal satellite orbit a blue-white spark that is a source of hard radiation, recognized by the holothete, Joelle, as a black hole.

Anderson summarizes the data:

a massive supernova remnant that has become an ultimate collapsar;
gravity so strong that even light cannot escape;
matter shrunk toward a geometrical point called a singularity where physical laws no longer apply;
a very small wave-mechanical leakage;
matter pulled in releases energy but then disappears - unless the Others know something different?

Brodersen deduces that the satellite is an observatory and wants to investigate but Joelle intuits that the forces, energies and space are too strange for them to cope with and that they had better depart immediately.

Jump.