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Mass of 20 billion of our suns?

1K views 14 replies 5 participants last post by  Murby 
#1 ·
Well, in all of my professed wonderment I have seen our universe in two venues, one - expanding too fast so as to never return to a single point, at some point dying out due to no new energy to exploit and two, not enough energy to separate everything sufficiently to never return to a single point. This is neither information that I have dreaded nor welcomed. It seems reasonable with the inference of black holes that there would, at some point, be some sort of reckoning. This finding seems to validate what I call the "big crunch", of course leading to another "big bang".

This Black Hole is eating matter in the estimated amount of one of our suns every two days. What happens when it has enough attraction to eat all of the stars in it's parent galaxy? I have not yet ascertained which galactic string that it is homed in, it's late and I will look later but what if there is another galaxy nearby and it devours it too? ...and another?

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australian-astronomers-find-black-hole-as-big-as-20-billion-suns

ETA: I'm just taking a guess that no black hole has ever had a nova type of explosion, yes?
 
#2 ·
Actually, and its a bit counter intuitive, but the mass of a black hole is directly related to the size of its home galaxy. The more massive the black hole at the center, the more mass in the galaxy around it. (generally speaking) Its a symbiotic relationship in a way, but not exactly.
While there are some unknowns, such as the exact roll and effect dark matter has upon the formation of a galaxy, the basics are that as a galaxy starts off and the black hole at the center accumulates mass, the rest of the galaxy is saved by angular momentum.

Ever see a figure skater go into one of those spins? When they pull their arms in, they spin faster and faster right? That is angular momentum at work.
In the absence of a countering torque (force, friction, etc) , angular momentum is always conserved. So, as the mass of the host galaxy starts to fall into the black hole, its radius from the center gets smaller, but its rotational speed (velocity traveling through space) around the black hole increases. Its angular momentum is conserved even though its orbital attributes (distance and speed) have changed.

Since gravity (the attractive force of a black hole or that of the Earth or any other object), is a function of velocity, all the galactic mass has to do is reach a specific speed at a specific distance, to overcome the attraction and remain in orbit.

This is, in fact, how Dark Matter was discovered.. The mass closest to the black hole should be traveling at a velocity much faster than the mass at the edges of the galaxy. But when we look at the galaxy, the stuff closer to the center is traveling at about the same velocity as the stuff at the outside edges. Huh? What? That doesn't make sense...

With a bit of extrapolation, we can see that the stuff on the outside edges should be flung out and away.. but somehow the galaxy is able to hold on to it.. the only explanation is that the galaxy has more mass than we can see... Enter dark matter..
 
#7 ·
So, with all of your learned wisdom, at what point does a black hole establish itself capable of devouring a galaxy? At which point does a black hole achieve critical mass, if one has ever done so before? At which point does the universe contract rather than expand? This finding seems to place this conversation into the "possibility" realm and I hoped you would have a conversation about it as it seems to be an interest that we share...
 
#10 ·
The gravitational pull of all black holes is the same at the event horizon. More massive black holes have larger event horizons but the pull of gravity at that event horizon is all the same regardless of the size (mass) of the object.

It might help to stop thinking of gravity as a pulling force, and start thinking of it as an acceleration of mass. For instance, Earth's gravity will accelerate mass at 9.8 meters per second. (at the surface).

The event horizon of a black hole is the point at which the pull of the black hole will accelerate mass at the speed of light. So with that in mind, all black holes have the same gravitational pull at their event horizons, some just have larger event horizons than others.

Its a bit like the "Pound of feathers vs pound of lead" joke.. it doesn't matter, its still the same amount of mass. A galaxy with 100 billion solar masses and 100 billion stars (pound of feathers) will have the same gravitational effect on its neighbors as a single black hole with 100 billion solar masses (pound of lead). Lets skip all the mass distribution and density arguments for the sake of simplicity.

There is no such thing as black hole critical mass unless you set a radius parameter first, which would be silly except for mathematical exercises. Even your car could become a black hole if you were able to compress it down to a small enough point that it reaches its Schwarzschild radius, at which point it would become a black hole with its own event horizon. Or, if you set a radius parameter first, the question would be how much mass would you need to squeeze into your back seat for your car to become a black hole.

Our own galaxy has about 100 to 250 billion solar masses and we're not swallowing up much of anything else around us.

Even if there was a black hole with a trillion solar masses, it wouldn't mean much to us if its on the other side of the universe.

As far as what happens at the end.. big bang vs. big crunch vs nothing at all... there's a lot of guesswork out there and none of it means much until we figure out what dark matter and dark energy are.

The "wow" factor in your link is not so much the size of the black hole they discovered, but the speed at which it's accumulating matter. At the rate that black hole is feeding, the amount of radiation it is giving off would most likely kill everything in its own galaxy (I think).. I could be wrong on that.

A far more important question in the universe is: Why is the service engine soon light coming on in my truck?
 
#14 ·
Shine,
Found a great video for you that does a fantastic job of explaining black holes using rock, earth, the sun, cats, etc.. (yes, I said cats).
OK... Back from Puerto Rico... Should start a thread to help them get the interstate exit signs made and put back up along with getting the traffic signals and street lights replaced across most of the island... Scheesh.

Thanks for the video, I am as amazed with the pen work in this video as I was when I watched the first pen plotter draw a diagram.

While there was a lot of explaining and, again, I thank you for providing it, do you have a video that explains the video that you posted?

lol

Cutting to the chase, you're saying two things - I think, one a black hole can never get big enough to collapse any further as do stars, correct - and - two, there is never any way for a black hole to consume it's host galaxy, double correct?
 
#15 ·
While there was a lot of explaining and, again, I thank you for providing it, do you have a video that explains the video that you posted?

lol

Cutting to the chase, you're saying two things - I think, one a black hole can never get big enough to collapse any further as do stars, correct - and - two, there is never any way for a black hole to consume it's host galaxy, double correct?
Let me see if I can try to explain it a bit differently and start with some fundamentals.... and I'll tell ya, a lot of this contradicts what I was even taught in high school long ago.
To understand what a black hole is, you have to understand some quantum physics.. but nothing too in depth, just the shallow basics. The very little really does control the very big...

Grade school science books always depicted and showed models of atoms in very poor scale.. They'd show something like a group of tennis balls at the center nucleus (representing protons and neutrons) and the orbiting electron would be something like a sweet pea.. and be located somewhat close to the nucleus like two or three tennis ball diameters away at that scale.

In reality, if you were to scale up an atom so that the protons and neutrons at the center (the nucleus) were the size of tennis balls, the electron would be smaller than a particle of smoke and its orbit would be about 3 to 5 miles away from the tennis ball. (YIKES!).. Yes, that's not a typo.. three to five MILES from the center at that scale. Everything between the electron and the nucleus (center of the atom) would be empty space.. Not space filled with air because air is just matter made of atoms, but actual empty space.. a complete and total void of all matter.. a vacuum. So in reality, an atom is 99.9999999999999% empty space. (maybe I should have added more 9's?)

An electron orbits the nucleus at about 2000 kilometers per second in actual real speed.. (about 1% speed of light) so at the small scale of atoms, for all practical purposes, the electron is going around the nucleus so fast (2000 km/s) that its just a spherical blur like a fan blade in your living room.. only many times faster. Its like an orbital halo called an "electron shell".. its so fast, it might as well be solid sort-to-speak.

Due to something called the "Pauli Exclusion Principle", the "halo's" of individual atoms can not overlap each other (think the Mastercard symbol with the overlapping circles) Like a bunch of ping pong balls in a container.. they can't go inside each other's shell.

But in simplistic terms, if you squeezed a bunch of atoms together with enough pressure (think core of large star), you could compress the electron shell into such a small space that the electrons would literally be pushed into the protons and combine with the protons to form more neutrons. (1 Proton + 1 Electron = 1 Neutron for all basic purposes)

The atoms fight this squeezing pressure and we call it the "Electron Degeneracy Pressure".. Like squeezing an egg in your hand, the egg puts up a fight, but if you squeeze hard enough, it lets go, the shell breaks, and it collapses.

When a star like our Sun collapses, it doesn't have enough matter at its core to overcome electron degeneracy pressure so it leaves behind something called a White Dwarf.. they're normally about the physical size of the Earth but there's so much matter that it its like having thousands of Earths all squeezed into the same physically sized ball. Electron degeneracy pressure is what keeps that ball from collapsing any further.. A White Dwarf is a very dense object, a teaspoon of White Dwarf matter would weigh about as much as an 18 wheel semi-truck.

If the original star contains about 10 times the mass of our sun, it will go supernova and the explosion will compress the core.. and while it happens very fast, the core will first become a white dwarf, then the Electron degeneracy pressure is overcome and the electrons are squeezed into the protons to form neutrons.. and a Neutron Star is formed.

Remember all that empty space an atom has inside it? Well now all that empty space is gone.. because all that empty space is gone, it is now occupied by other matter. Neutrons are positioned right next to other neutrons with no extra space between them.. Its one big clump of neutron matter and 1 teaspoon would weigh as much as an entire mountain!
The rough equivalent of 10 White Dwarfs (ball the size of earth with thousands of times more mass), has now been compressed into a ball just around 10 to 15 miles in diameter.

The thing that keeps neutrons from being squeezed together is something called Neutron Degeneracy pressure.. So we understand that an atom looks like a round spherical ball because the electron is orbiting the nucleus so fast it makes it seem like a solid surface.
Neutrons are the same way only instead of protons and electrons, neutrons contain particles called Quarks. Each neutron has three quarks inside.

This following is where known science meets hypothesis.. We're not entirely sure what happens when neutrons are squeezed with so much pressure that they also combine. What we do know is that the resulting mass has enough gravitational pull to reach its Schwarzschild radius and no light (electromagnetic energy) can escape for us to get information from.

The most accepted idea is that once Neutron Degeneracy Pressure has been overcome, it all collapses to an infinite point.. But this has never made sense to me and a lot of very important physicists are now starting to believe in something called a "Quark Star".. But in practical reality, there would be no fundamental difference (to us anyhow) between a Quark Star and or whatever comes last. IE: The absolute maximum density if it even exists.. To us, once you pass neutron star, no more information can be gathered because no light or other information escapes.. (we'll skip the whole Hawking Radiation thing for now).

Can a black hole swallow its host galaxy? Sure it can, and it will eventually.. in time frames measured in Trillions of years.. (universe is only around 13.7 Billion years old so don't cancel any appointments)

But remember, a galaxy with a mass of 100 billion sun-like stars will have the same gravitational effect on other galaxies as a single black hole with a mass of 100 billion sun-like stars. (But would probably be really cool to see the gravitational lensing of such an object)

Extrapolating even further, maybe the whole Quark Star thing is correct and they hypothesize that even quarks are made up of even more fundamental particles call preons.. and maybe those are made up of something..

This whole thing has always reminded me of those Russian Nesting Dolls where you open one up, and another one is inside.. open that one up, and an even smaller on inside.

And maybe, each stage of collapse (Electron Degeneracy > Neutron Degeneracy > Quark Degeneracy > Whatever) leads to an end and maybe it takes all the matter in the universe to reach those kinds of pressures, and when they are reached, they rebound and explode again into another Big Bang. Matter is created, galaxies coalesce, life forms, and eventually intelligent beings discuss it all on some machine invented by more intelligent beings.
 
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