Monster Black Hole Busts Theory

Genocaust writes "A stellar black hole much more massive than theory predicts is possible has astronomers puzzled. Stellar black holes form when stars with masses around 20 times that of the sun collapse under the weight of their own gravity at the ends of their lives. Most stellar black holes weigh in at around 10 solar masses when the smoke blows away, and computer models of star evolution have difficulty producing black holes more massive than this. The newly weighed black hole is 16 solar masses. It orbits a companion star in the spiral galaxy Messier 33, located 2.7 million light-years from Earth. Together they make up the system known as M33 X-7."

Supermassive black holes

[Raul654]

If theory says that black holes beyond 10 solar masses cannot form, how do they explain the conjectured supermassive black holes [wikipedia.org] at the center of our and other galaxies?

Re:Supermassive black holes

[shawn(at)fsu]

They mentioned that in the article. Mister Scientist thinks their are different mechacisms at work that produce the super massive black holes at the centre of galaxies. I was wondering though, is it possible that a black hole of this mass could me produces in a trinary solar system where two black holes merge, in this case leaving you with a 16 solar masses and orbiting the remain star?

Re:Supermassive black holes

[ILuvRamen]

I was thinking the same thing. And you know how they get that big? By forming and then sucking up tons and stars around them. And who says this one didn't form differently? It's in a binary system now but trinary systems exist. And don't say "but it didn't suck up 6 stars." They just said in the article that some stars can be 20 solar masses. That's a really badly named unit lol.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[jd]

What if you have an n-ary system in which two or more supermassive stars are sufficiently close together that after the supernova, the total mass exceeds 10 solar masses even though no individual star did? (Since the star cores would merge at the common center of gravity, they would behave as a single remnant of the combined mass, NOT as individual collapsing objects.) Alternatively, if the black hole forms in a regular fashion but is in a dense enough zone - or a zone that has an obscenely large number of extra-solar supermassive planets - that it absorbs six or more solar masses before it can evaporate a comparable amount of mass, you'd reach the desired mass. Thirdly, my guess is that all simulations assume point singularities (probably the most common kind, assuming black hole theory is correct), which means that they won't be including Kerr Ring singularities or any of the other Really Weird Forms that have been predicted.

I'm sure that there are ways to fudge things so that the desired mass can be reached. Or, there again, the simulations could be wrong. That happens, for all that Michael Fish wishes otherwise. Well, maybe not. He stands to make a lot of money from his new book because of that fiasco.

hmm

[thatskinnyguy]

One black hole consumes another black hole creating one gigantic gravitational singularity. Case closed.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[Hal_Porter]

Goody. This should end well.

People said that about plutonium and agent orange.

What exactly does "evaporate" mean when referring to black holes (stars)?

They explode with the force of five million megatons of TNT - the power off 100,000 Tsar Bombas [wikipedia.org] concentrated in tiny region of space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation [wikipedia.org]

So, for instance, a 1 second-lived black hole has a mass of 2.28 × 10^5 kg, equivalent to an energy of 2.05 × 10^22 J that could be released by 5 × 10^6 megatons of TNT. The initial power is 6.84 × 10^21 W.

The shockwave should be enough to totally destroy the Earth, not just obliterate the biosphere which is that best that can be achieved with present day fission/fusion weapons. Even lunar colonies would be hard pressed to survive the explosion. Maybe the moon would be blasted off in to deep space.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[anno1602]

An alternative explanation is that the supermassive black hole might have formed directly. On formation, so much mass accumulated so quickly that it directly collapsed into a black hole, bypassing the star stage entirely.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[ZombieWomble]

That's something of a misleading post - while a "one second" black hole would indeed release such a huge amount of energy, the creation of such a black hole is unthinkable in the LHC: The energy the protons collide with is around 14TeV, or about 10^-6 joules. That's more than a billion billion billion times lower than the one second black hole you suggest in your post. The size of black holes produced in CERN would dissipate almost instantly, with a relatively small puff of particles.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[octal666]

I think laws of physics are the same inside and outside of Soviet Russia, no joke here, move along.

Re:hmm

[thatskinnyguy]

Sometimes the correct and simple explanations are overlooked in favor of more complicated, yet impressive-sounding wrong ones.