IMPORTANCE
Well, it’s been a long while hasn’t it? But finally, I’m back making new art.
A lot of things have happened, so I felt like doing something more introspective than usual this time. For whatever reason, I love drawing Tartarus and Stella having quiet conversations about philosophical things. Maybe it’s just the absurdity of the comparatively* tiny Stella juxtaposed against the great dark void of Tartarus and just...kind of talking to it.
Usually when I draw this sort of scenario Stella is far off to the side of Tartarus’ shadow and so he basically appears as a dark wall to the side of the page. I wanted here to more fully capture just how supermassive he is, so she is front of him this time, silhouetted against his darkness. One of these days I intend to do a sketch illustrating how his “face” is not a specific scale to the rest of his body, given that his eyes are just random gas clouds he uses to try to make facial expressions.
Stella’s backstory is hinted at towards the beginning of the comic, but I intend to save the details for the science fiction novel** I have been working on...or am at least trying to (LOL grad school).
Okay...now for some science notes...(I really need something like an ExplainXKCD wiki).
-It is commonly stated that you can see the infinite future of the Universe while falling into a black hole, but this is only true if you hover at the event horizon (which takes infinite energy), or get vaporized by all the light of the infinite future hitting you as a singularity while you’re already inside the black hole. Basically, it’s not a sight you can actually witness. However, given that Tartarus is the black hole itself, I imagine the part of him that is inside the event horizon has seen the infinite future, and so he knows what will happen to everyone (including Stella). He does not tell anyone though, as this future has already happened to part of him, and thus, if he tells anyone, he’s essentially communicating into the past. Stella would not be able to change the future with this knowledge (since the future events have in some sense already happened) so he figures it’s best he never shares it with anyone. The knowledge does inflict deep psychological scars on him, however, though he usually hides it pretty well...
-Stella essentially is not thinking very clearly here, and in her desire to get closer to Tartarus, decides to approach him in the direction opposite his rotation. This causes her to precipitously drop towards him, which is of course, not good. Tartarus’ reaction in the third-to-last panel where he’s frowning/grasping at her is kind of a confused mix of emotions: the instinctual part of him that’s like “hey look free food,” the more rational part of him that’s like “wait a minute is she really doing that?” and the emotional part of him that’s like “NOOOO I don’t want to hurt you please don’t fall into me please don’t”
-I have no idea what the view from inside a black hole’s ergosphere would look like. It’s not something that’s really been modeled, as far as I know, given that it’s a view we’ll likely never see. I just filled it with swirling, turbulent gas, the blue representing violet/UV light, the green representing gamma rays (like from positron-electron annihilation or pion decays†) and the magenta representing x-rays.
As for why there’s also giant teeth? Well, Tartarus’ ergosphere is sorta the equivalent of his mouth, given he can scoop material up into it and suspend it above his throat/event horizon, locking onto it with his rotation, before swallowing it or spitting it out at relativistic speed. So Stella kind of visualizes his gravity as grasping fangs.
-The Penrose process would involve a) Stella falling towards Tartarus at relativistic speeds b) getting ripped in half c) half of her falling into Tartarus while the other half gets ejected at even more relativistic speeds. So her reluctance is obvious.
* I mean, Stella is a sunlike star, so she’s not actually tiny.
**If you’re wondering why the celestial body characters’ descriptions on my webcomic character pages are short compared to say, the natural disaster characters’, this is why. Most of the details of their life story I’m saving for the science fiction novel.
†So it turns out that an optically thin accretion flow as seen across most of Tartarus here would not have many gamma rays from pair annihilation. So this could mostly be from the decay of pions produced by proton-proton collisions. Then again, I imagine the accretion flow to be much denser in Tartarus’ ergosphere, and the magnetization to be higher, allowing more positron-electron pairs to be created. Make of this what you will. #nitpicking