🇨🇦@abetterjulie Well yes, when a magnetic field rotates, anything conductive will experience an induced electric potential. Detecting that on Earth is hard because we fill the air with so much EM noise, but it's there.
@abetterjulie (And that's how an account about old computers inspired someone to become a physicist)
@mos_8502 my fantasy-inclined brain: What if galaxies are all just giant batteries?
@abetterjulie Well, most spiral galaxies like ours seem to have a supermassive black hole at the centre; this XXXXL black hole has a bunch of matter swirling around it called an accretion disc. As the matter gets closer to the black hole, the friction of the molecules rubbing against each other gets so hot that about half the mass never actually makes it into the black hole, it just gets shot out as X-rays and other such ionizing radiation. That's an awful lot of energy being released.
@abetterjulie Sort of, yeah. You could call it that. Certainly everything going into the disc is dead, life itself isn't possible anywhere near that much radiation.