1600 LIGHT-YEARS, DAMMIT! LIGHT-YEARS! NOT MILES! Jeesh....
And on Dan's argument that we could have black holes or neutron stars in
every sector, but we couldn't see them if they weren't companions of bright
astral bodies (like, say, Nina Hartley's |-> ), I'm afraid that that argument
falls apart at densities like those he suggests. The black holes about which
we know (or claim to know) are very far away from us, and can only be seen by
their Xray emissions, but if we had a black hole within our back yard (i.e.
within 25 parsecs, the radius of our sector, approx), we'd sure as hell know
it. Black holes cause vicious gravitational lensing; as they move across the
sky, they'd cause the light of stars that they occulted to move in response
to their gravity wells. If any sort of concerted effort were made to chart
star movements within a sector, it would take very little time (in historical
terms, that is) to spot the effects of a black hole in a sector; and at one-
per-subsector densities, things get even worse.
metlay
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