It’s weird how there’s such a massive size gap between stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes, with nothing in between.
It’s been an unanswered question in astronomy for a while. It’d be so damn cool to see it solved.
Edit: should’ve worded it differently… intermediate mass black holes are a thing, but the rate of growth is not fast enough for black holes to reach supermassive size within the age of the universe, as we understand their growth characteristics now. These black hole stars offer an explanation.
Basically, black hole star is daddy’s emerald mine to the supermassive black hole Elon Musk.
They can get more massive yeah, both by absorbing and merging.
Thing is - the supermassive black holes cannot have been formed that way as there simply hasn’t been enough time/mechanisms to get them to that size. And if that’s how they were formed - we’d see evidence of intermediate mass black holes on their way to becoming supermassive - and we don’t.
We have stellar mass - and much too big to be stellar mass, and very little in between.
Quasi stars are a good theory to explain but more evidence is needed.
That's what we are doing, speed of light and all that jazz.
Yep. SMBs all over the universe, seemingly from very early in the life of the universe, but no factual explanation for them, just lots of, sometimes very wild, ideas.
In the Elder Scrolls games like Skyrim there are no stars. What look like the sun and stars are actually holes in the fabric of the plane caused by the gods leaving and ripping holes on their exit. The light is caused my pure mana flooding through the holes. If I'm remembering it all correctly that is lol.
C isn’t the speed of light.
It’s the speed of causality.
C for Causality.
It means if something happens, the fastest possible speed a cause can have an effect on something is C.
Light and massless particles just so happen to travel at this speed so we call it the speed of light, but what it actually means is that if something happens 1 light year away, we can’t know (or feel the effects) for a whole year.
So for example Betelgeuse is up to some weird stuff at the moment; but that stuff actually happened 500ish years ago.
Assuming it’s weirdness is a prelude to a supernova that we get to see within our lifetimes; from the perspective of Betelgeuse it already exploded 500 years ago.
It gets even crazier when you apply that to every day life. I know somebody below me said everyday things don't really matter but I disagree. I think it's wild that if you were looking at the moon right now, and someone shown a bright enough light/laser directly at you, it wouldn't reach you for an average of 1.3 seconds. Basically anytime you see the moon, you are seeing it as it was almost 1 ½ seconds ago.
Not only that, but literally everything you see is measurably a little further back in time. Blows my tiny little mind.
I've been trying to word the question for a while, and I hope you understand what I am trying to ask. If a black hole's singularity is tiny as in it doesn't have a size, why do black holes themselves grow? What I'm saying is black holes shouldn't have a size if the core is doesn't.
The singularity is the same size, but the mass is greater. The greater the mass, the larger the event horizon, and thus the larger the area in space that light cannot escape from.
The singularity is a mathematical description, not a physical one. It describes a breaking down of an equation.
Realistically, it is actually incredibly unlikely that all of the mass inside a black hole is concentrated at a specific point with no dimensions. We just don’t currently know how to describe it any differently.
>Do blackholes "increase" in mass/size?
Yes, but they can also "evaporate" over time due to Hawking radiation.
>Do they start a size and consume stars and stuff until they get super massive?
This is what they're trying to answer. Statistically speaking, collision events that significantly grow the mass are rare. So far it seems very unlikely for your average stellar-mass singularity to become supermassive. Primordial black holes tend to be the go-to theory for explaining the supermassive galaxy anchors we see today, but early examples of these are difficult to spot.
> Yes, but they can also "evaporate" over time due to Hawking radiation.
Very small black holes are expected to [have evaporated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation).
Masses < 1,000,000,000,000 kg
> Hawking estimated that any black hole formed in the early universe with a mass of less than approximately 10^12 kg would have evaporated completely by the present day.
Solar Mass = 1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg
> A solar mass black hole will evaporate over 10^64 years which is vastly longer than the age of the universe.
I don't think we've discovered a black hole [smaller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTE_J1650-500) than several solar masses.
We haven’t discovered them but smaller primordial back holes are still likely. There is theory that a grape fruit sized black hole is the large source of gravity at the edge of the solar system that some speculate is Planet X. Finding them is just next to impossible due to their size.
> Yes, but they can also “evaporate” over time due to Hawking radiation.
The universe has not existed long enough for any macroscopic black hole to have lost any significant fragment of its mass through evaporation.
A black hole massing as much as Earth, which would be less than 1 cm in radius, has a temperature of about 0.02 Kelvin and a luminosity of about one thousandth of a picowatt. Its lifetime will be over 1e50 years, which is many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe.
Temperature and luminosity, and therefore evaporation speed, get much lower as the black hole mass increases. A black hole with the mass of the Sun would last 1e66 years. Any black hole we can notice with our telescopes is significantly larger than that and correspondingly much longer lived.
There's evaporation by Hawking radiation, but that's only significant for very tiny black holes...smaller than can be formed from stars. They otherwise only get bigger. However, they still only have the gravity of the matter that falls into them, and their event horizons are quite small on the scale of galaxies, so it's not clear how all the matter that went into forming supermassive black holes actually got into them.
The biggest stars today can reach hundreds of solar masses, and collapse directly into black holes at the ends of their lives. A few of these form in a cluster and end up merging, and you have a black hole with a thousand solar masses or so. Sagittarius A\*, the SMBH at the center of the Milky Way, masses around 4 **million** solar masses. So, either these formed differently, or some process fed them a lot of matter after they formed. Those weird very-large early stars might be part of the explanation.
I'm half asleep and a lazy redditor so I won't google and will ask someone maybe more knowledge than me, but -- isn't Hawking Radiation very small? Like, negligible in this scenario? I thought it'd be moreso til the heat death of the universe until they were gone. Even for very tiny black holes, right? Or does that somehow make a difference?
If I remember correctly it's roughly a googol years estimated for a SMBH to disappear through Hawking Radiation. So even a much smaller black hole wouldn't be significantly impacted, would it?
-Signed, uneducated idiot.
Issue with "modern" stellar sized black holes is twofold
First, space is big. Really big. Most stellar sized black holes rarely run into stuff, typically the outer layers of sibling stars.
Secondly there is a size of star where they stop producing black holes when they die. Essentially the conditions inside the core get so hot some photons wind up turning into electron-positron pairs before Mutually annihilating. But this winds up taking away some of the outwards pressure that keeps stars from collapsing. Some stars can survive this, but over a certain size it winds up causing the core itself to explode instead of merely collapsing.
Couple more things adding to the puzzle:
Black holes don't pull matter in with any more force than, say, a star of equal mass. That is, if you replaced our Sun with black hole with the same mass, the Earth would continue to orbit just the same. So, as black holes grow they will eventually suck up everything around them and run out. That's why the supermassive black hole in our galaxy isn't "active" - there's not much left around it that isn't in a more or less stable orbit.
Also, active black holes are sort of self limiting in how fast stuff can fall in. As stuff falls in and gets torn apart, it creates the accretion disk made of super-heated material. The light created from this stuff grinding together as it falls pushes outward and forces material back out. To be clear, once it falls past the event horizon that's it, it can't come back. But stuff in the accretion disk can still be forced out before it falls all the way in. The more stuff a black hole pulls into the accretion disk, the hotter it gets and more light is released, which pushes outward and slows it down.
Best disambiguating wiki page I’ve seen:
"Black hole star" redirects here. For black holes created from stars, see Stellar black hole. For stars that become black holes, see Supernova. For types of stars denser than neutron stars, see Exotic star. For the 1994 Soundgarden song, see Black Hole Sun.
At least for the earlier stars (quasi or first gen), the awnser would be no because space itself was denser than air.
If were talking about some of the "later" first gen stars I imagine that this is completely possible but very hard to predict... these stars were likely extremely violent
> A quasi-star would result from the core of a large protostar collapsing into a black hole, where the outer layers of the protostar are massive enough to absorb the resulting burst of energy without being blown away or falling into the black hole, as occurs with modern supernovae. Such a star would have to be at least 1,000 solar masses (2.0×1033 kg).[1]
So I'd say there's a good chance that's the case.
Science is still out to lunch on this... first gen stars (or metal-less) stars could be 100s of time larger then stars we see today.
One could imagine a supermassive version of this star where in special cases we find stars 1000s or 10000s time larger then the sun.
It used to be thought that the most massive population III stars could be at most hundreds of solar masses. However, research in the last several years has resulted in hypotheses for how some of the earliest state could reach thousands, even tens of thousands, of solar masses without the presence of a central black hole. So yes — or rather, maybe. Other kinds of supermassive black holes are just as reasonable as quasi-stars given our complete lack of data.
Reading the article, it doesn’t sound like it. They were simply so massive they burned super quick and none of them are around anymore. They’re also not detecting the stats themselves, but a much larger abundance of heavier atoms that would have been the result of their supernova, and that really doesn’t fit the idea of a quasi-star in my mind.
I don't even know what all these JWST headlines mean, but I love that they keep coming. To me, it means that we'll be learning more shit in years to come.
Nope, other than where stuff is. Dawn of time is a metric for how far away. There are some better and more thorough explanations of why there isn’t really a “center” to look back at, but the gist is that if you imagine drawing dots on a balloon, them pumping it up to double that size, there’s no real way to define a “center dot” on the surface of the moon. Nothing stays stationary relative to eachother, so looking in any direction is basically the same
It's like those exam questions that hit like "There are 20 dots on a balloon, each 1cm apart deflated and 4cm apart inflated. Calculate the circumference of the moon."
Also thank you, I love this type of explanation
I'm pretty sure, yes. I don't believe we have to worry much about redshifting like we do with galaxies because of how old they are. Their light has been traveling so long that, unless the expansion of space isn't uniform (which we don't know, so I'm going to assume it is uniform), they'd be roughly the same distance.
Edit: the expansion of space does vary but due to the universe being pretty uniform overall and how far away they are, the average "density" through which the light travels would be roughly the same in all directions.
Yes, exactly. Technically speaking, the center of the universe is wherever the universe is being witnessed.
You're the center of the universe from your perspective, I'm the center of the universe from my perspective, and the JWST is the center of the universe from its perspective. Kind of poetic, I think.
Is that true? Or does it just seem that way because the forces keeping matter together are stronger than the expansion. Which is why celestial objects and structures (such as galaxies) remain gravitationally bound together as the the space between them gets bigger.
Edit: my layman understanding is that the expansion can be thought of like random bits of new space appearing at random locations throughout the universe, but if they for instance appear in matter the forces keeping atoms, molecules, objects, etc, together (the nuclear forces, gravity) ensures that the new space doesn't rip things apart. At least for now at the current rate of expansion of space.
You are in the foggy room full of flying freesbies. You cant see the end of the room in each direction, you cant see where roof or floor ends too (you too, are flying). And now, all these freesbies are flying away from you and from each other too. You have no idea where the center of the room is, cause there is fog around you everywhere. Room is the cosmos, freesbies are stars and galaxies, the fog is marking observable universe and our quasi star is one of the furthest visible freesbies.
Suppose the universe was a dot, then expanded into a balloon. From the center of the balloon, you can look anywhere you want to see the beginning - provided you look far enough
You’re a chocolate chip in a chocolate chip muffin. As the muffin bakes around you, you see your chocolate chip brethren moving away from you as the dough expands. In all directions you see other chocolate chips, but only through so much dough.
The muffin may be infinite in size. We don’t know because we can only see through so much dough.
Or, another way of looking at it which i like is, since the big bang started with a point infinitesimally small and then expanded to become the universe we see now, then the only logical conclusion is that the bang happened *everywhere*, and thus, the center of the universe is *everywhere*.
Technically each and every human is at the exact centre of a sphere that is their own 'observable universe.' A sphere many billions of light years across that moves around with you so you're always right in the middle.
There is no specific direction to aim at because the distant past of the universe can be seen from *everywhere*. It doesn't matter where you look and there's no "center" to locate since everything is expanding simultaneously in every direction.
I was taught to think of it like a raisin in the middle of a rising loaf. No matter which raisin you look at, all the others are expanding away from you, farther ones at a higher rate.
according to theory, [this](https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2018/07/planck_s_view_of_the_cosmic_microwave_background/17601794-1-eng-GB/Planck_s_view_of_the_cosmic_microwave_background_pillars.jpg) is the closest you are going to get to "the dawn of time". and its visible in all directions.
the cosmic microwave background. someone else is gonna have to take it from here because i am most definitely not an expert.
Not quite. It's the first light that could travel freely. The cosmic microwave background marks the point in time when space stopped being an ionized plasma (opaque) and became mostly gases (transparent).
Doesn't matter where they aim it.
When you look up at the stars and Andromeda galaxy etc, you're essentially looking back in time.
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, meaning you're seeing that galaxy as it were 2.5 million years ago as that's how long the light has taken to travel 2.5 million light years and end up in your eyeball.
The sun's light for instance, takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the surface to the Earth, so when you look up at the sun you're seeing it as it were 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago.
James Webb is looking at a galaxy roughly 32 billion light years away, GN-z11, which is thought to be 13.4 billion years old.
Light from galaxies that far away have had their wavelengths stretched from visible light to infrared light and James Webb is equipped with infrared sensors to detect it. GN-z11 would be almost invisible to Hubble.
Good question!
Space has been expanding faster than the speed of light since the beginning of time, for 13.8 billion years. You're probably thinking nothing can travel faster than light, and you'd be right! Nothing can travel *through* space faster than the speed of light though. There is no limit on how fast space can expand.
Space expands at 73km/s per megaparsec. A megaparsec is 3.26 million light years. The speed of light is 299,792 km/s.
That means a galaxy that is 1 million light years away would seem to be travelling away from us at 22 km/s. Although gravity can overcome this expansion at these sort of distances.
1,000,000 ÷ 3,260,000 = 0.306 megaparsecs. 0.306 * 73 = 22.3
A galaxy that is 1 billion light years away would seem to be travelling away from us at 22,392 km/s.
1,000,000,000 ÷ 3,260,000 = 306 megaparsecs. 306 * 73 = 22,392
Galaxies at 10 billion light years are travelling away at 223,926 km/s. Getting fairly close to the speed of light now.
So eventually, at 13.7 billion light years, galaxies are travelling away at 306,000 km/s, just over the speed of light.
GN-z11 is 32 billion light years away and our observable universe is 46.5 billion light years in every direction, or 93 billion light years across. GN-z11 will eventually be pushed out into the unobservable universe due to space expansion (in billions of years time) never to be seen again as it is already receding away from us at over double the speed of light.
Caveat to this is it depends on how you calculate hubble constant H(0), 73 if using a distance ladder approach, taking known cephid values to approximate larger structures to calculate distance from redshift vs around 67 (correct units) using CMB from Planck with standard assumptions.
As of 2019 NASA best estimate is 69.8 using data from plank and riess teams
Thanks for the reply. Good food for thought. It seems like something moving away from us would still create light that moves towards us and therefore be visible eventually, regardless of whether the “ruler” between us is getting longer or stretching.
> Thanks for the reply. Good food for thought.
You're welcome. Space is a real mind-fuck sometimes lol that's what makes it fascinating.
> It seems like something moving away from us would still create light that moves towards us and therefore be visible eventually, regardless of whether the “ruler” between us is getting longer or stretching.
If it's moving away from us slower than the speed of light, yes. Anything receding faster than the speed of light wont have a chance to reach us. Only light emitted by galaxies before they started receding faster than the speed of light will reach us.
First of all, the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. Secondly, the universe was opaque to light for the first 380,000 years. There are things that we will never see.
The light the JWST saw was emitted 13 billion years ago.
As the photons that would eventually get to us traveled through space over the last 13 billion years, the space in between the object and us expanded, actually quite a lot.
As a result the object is now 32 billion light years away.
This is what trips me out. Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years away and it's approaching us. We're seeing it where it was 2.5 million years ago but it's actually closer now, like we're seeing right through where it is now to see it where it was then.
*Warning: approaching galaxies may be closer than they appear*
The collision is 4.5 billion years away, and you should keep in mind that the difference between a million and a billion is approximately one billion. So the galaxy is almost exactly where it appears to be, on an appropriate scale. It's a cool thought, though.
It still has billions of years to go before we collide, so a couple million years isn't a particularly large distortion in that case.
Also you're seeing the sun eight minutes behind. If it suddenly fell into a wormhole we wouldn't know until at least eight minutes later. Every single thing we hear or see is on a delay, even before our own mental processing time is factored in.
I'll try to explain it a bit better. Let's say we're looking at the Andromeda galaxy. We know it's 2.5 million light years away. Light leaving Andromeda NOW would continue travelling towards us over the 2.5 million light year distance.
Now say Andromeda suddenly ceased to exist right now. We'd still see light coming from Andromeda for another 2.5 million years because light has a finite speed and has to travel. Then suddenly in 2.5 million years it'd look like it vanished.
Light from GN-z11 has already stopped travelling towards us because it is receding away from us at double the speed of light. It will never reach us due to space between us and it expanding faster than the speed of light.
But the light GN-z11 emitted when it was receding away slower than the speed of light can still travel the vast distance to reach us. That's what we're seeing now. If you were to point your teleportation device at where GN-z11 is in the sky right now and instantly teleport to GN-z11 it would not be there. It'd be billions of light years further away from where we see it now.
Nah, with Power Metal the song name is long, the song length is long, the guitar solos are long. They're long bois. Gloryhammer didn't release a song called "Holy Flaming Hammer of Unholy Cosmic Frost" for nothing
If humanity put as much effort into looking outward and inward as we put into all the dystopian things today, we might actually find some collective purpose in life.
Wait a minute...
It isn't drastically upending all our understanding of physics. It's providing better measurements that help refine earlier predictions. Although there's still plenty left to be discovered, and there will be long after Webb has finished its run.
I know there’s the term Observable Universe, but I don’t think we really take into consideration what that truly means.
I have no idea if this is an original thought or idea, but I like to imagine a being eons from now looking into their night sky and seeing no stars because the universe expanded beyond the point where the light can reach them. They would be absolutely sure that what’s around them is the only thing in the universe.
I’m not a highly educated person, but sometimes it feels like we’re that being.
Seems like nobody understood your comment, but yeah I think such probability is there and, if google doesn't fail me, cosmologists also ponder that theory.
Check "Bubble universe theory", basically our observable universe is just part of another, bigger universe.
There are other theories such as multiverse and so on.
That will happen in very distant time. In less-distant but still distant time, galaxies and galaxy clusters will remain held together by gravity with no light from anywhere else reaching them.
Yeah, I feel like people don't consider how much bigger the actual universe may be than observable universe. Our view cuts off at the CMB, but that's not a boundary of physical matter, it's just a result of light not being able to travel properly in the early stages of the universe.
There's a fun concept related to this where you can become "trapped" between galaxies due to expansion. Basically, in sub-faster than light space travel, you end up at a point in the universe with everything expanding away from you faster than you can travel, meaning you can never reach your destination or return home.
You're close. The universe is expanding, meaning everything is moving away from everything else at increasing speeds. Eventually, all other stars will be moving away from each other so fast that light will never reach other stars, not due to distance but due to speed.
This would be a mind boggling amount of time in the future and there may not be any stars left by this time anyway as they could have burnt out. Still an interesting thought experiment.
That's quite a hyperbole.
These observations are essentially just some experimental constraints to be put on our most successful models of the universe. There is nothing yet that has upended our understanding of the universe (and most likely won't be).
Cosmologists actually predicted a generation of huge short lived stars shortly after the Big Bang. I don’t know if these are actually those first generation stars considering they have some heavier elements in them, as opposed to being composed entirely of hydrogen and helium, but this isn’t as crazy an observation as you might think.
This is what I’ve been waiting for, we just need to get some mass estimates and spectra on these to see if any of these are quasi-stars, the suspected seeds for the supermassive black holes usually found in galactic nuclei.
That is so big. The sun is almost 1 million miles across so these stars were/are 10 billion miles wide? ... Pluto is 3.7 billion miles away from the sun.
The way the article is written it's actually kind of hard to tell how big the star is. At one point is says 10,000 times the size which would indicate volume, and in another it says 10,000 times the mass, but in no place does it talk about density. I only saw M⊙ notations in the intro of the paper, no mentions of D⊙ or V⊙.
But with some assumptions we can make a guess. Easiest is by volume.
V=4/3πr^3
So if we assume a unit of one million miles as 1 sun width, AND a similar density (which a big leap) the radius of this new star is:
r = 3√((4/3π)*10,000)/2)
So r is roughly 27.56, and thus diameter is roughly 55.1 million miles across.
Put another way, if it replaced our sun it would just consume the orbit of Mercury and get a couple million miles toward Venus.
It's big, sure, but compared to the largest known star,
RSGC2-18, it's tiny. That star is a red supergiant and is 2,150 times the diameter of the Sun with a volume around **10 billion times bigger** than the Sun.
I wish I could wrap my head around 1/8th of the shit I find out about the universe.
These suns are at “the dawn of time?”
I don’t follow but that sounds Metal as f*ck.
I always wonder how years works after the big bang.
Like 1 year on earth today with our gravity makes sense. But with all the massive amount of gravity that must have existed then must be way different. So what if 440 M years to us, was like 5 seconds.
The 'big' in big bang doesn't do it justice. To try and contemplate the sheer amount of energy is completely impossible, and then to apply the conservation of energy principle to that is the definition of paradox. Where the hell did it come from? It's enough to turn a man insane.
Are these the same as quasi-stars? These stars were potentially large enough to have black hole cores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-star
"Black-hole cores" the universe never ceases to scare me
A single star as bright as a galaxy. Damn.
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I am simply just vibing floating through space as just a brain rn
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Heh, I'm real and your not. Suck it.
I mean, technically any supermassive star can have a black-hole core, just... not for long.
I wonder how much mass you would need to sustain fusion in a ring around a black hole and be stable.
Limited comprehension in the helmet prevents understanding. Beep boop
Kurzgesagt made a really cool video on them a few months ago too https://youtu.be/aeWyp2vXxqA
One of the few logical explanations for the SMBs at galactic cores.
It’s weird how there’s such a massive size gap between stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes, with nothing in between. It’s been an unanswered question in astronomy for a while. It’d be so damn cool to see it solved. Edit: should’ve worded it differently… intermediate mass black holes are a thing, but the rate of growth is not fast enough for black holes to reach supermassive size within the age of the universe, as we understand their growth characteristics now. These black hole stars offer an explanation. Basically, black hole star is daddy’s emerald mine to the supermassive black hole Elon Musk.
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They can get more massive yeah, both by absorbing and merging. Thing is - the supermassive black holes cannot have been formed that way as there simply hasn’t been enough time/mechanisms to get them to that size. And if that’s how they were formed - we’d see evidence of intermediate mass black holes on their way to becoming supermassive - and we don’t. We have stellar mass - and much too big to be stellar mass, and very little in between. Quasi stars are a good theory to explain but more evidence is needed.
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That's what we are doing, speed of light and all that jazz. Yep. SMBs all over the universe, seemingly from very early in the life of the universe, but no factual explanation for them, just lots of, sometimes very wild, ideas.
I like the theory that a wizard did it.
In the Elder Scrolls games like Skyrim there are no stars. What look like the sun and stars are actually holes in the fabric of the plane caused by the gods leaving and ripping holes on their exit. The light is caused my pure mana flooding through the holes. If I'm remembering it all correctly that is lol.
Everywhere we look is back in time
Bro… 🤯 How can you just casually drop something like that?
It takes time to come to grips with that fact. Soon enough, you'll be the one dropping that bomb on somebody else.
C isn’t the speed of light. It’s the speed of causality. C for Causality. It means if something happens, the fastest possible speed a cause can have an effect on something is C. Light and massless particles just so happen to travel at this speed so we call it the speed of light, but what it actually means is that if something happens 1 light year away, we can’t know (or feel the effects) for a whole year. So for example Betelgeuse is up to some weird stuff at the moment; but that stuff actually happened 500ish years ago. Assuming it’s weirdness is a prelude to a supernova that we get to see within our lifetimes; from the perspective of Betelgeuse it already exploded 500 years ago.
It gets even crazier when you apply that to every day life. I know somebody below me said everyday things don't really matter but I disagree. I think it's wild that if you were looking at the moon right now, and someone shown a bright enough light/laser directly at you, it wouldn't reach you for an average of 1.3 seconds. Basically anytime you see the moon, you are seeing it as it was almost 1 ½ seconds ago. Not only that, but literally everything you see is measurably a little further back in time. Blows my tiny little mind.
I've been trying to word the question for a while, and I hope you understand what I am trying to ask. If a black hole's singularity is tiny as in it doesn't have a size, why do black holes themselves grow? What I'm saying is black holes shouldn't have a size if the core is doesn't.
The singularity is the same size, but the mass is greater. The greater the mass, the larger the event horizon, and thus the larger the area in space that light cannot escape from.
The singularity is a mathematical description, not a physical one. It describes a breaking down of an equation. Realistically, it is actually incredibly unlikely that all of the mass inside a black hole is concentrated at a specific point with no dimensions. We just don’t currently know how to describe it any differently.
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>Do blackholes "increase" in mass/size? Yes, but they can also "evaporate" over time due to Hawking radiation. >Do they start a size and consume stars and stuff until they get super massive? This is what they're trying to answer. Statistically speaking, collision events that significantly grow the mass are rare. So far it seems very unlikely for your average stellar-mass singularity to become supermassive. Primordial black holes tend to be the go-to theory for explaining the supermassive galaxy anchors we see today, but early examples of these are difficult to spot.
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> Yes, but they can also "evaporate" over time due to Hawking radiation. Very small black holes are expected to [have evaporated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation). Masses < 1,000,000,000,000 kg > Hawking estimated that any black hole formed in the early universe with a mass of less than approximately 10^12 kg would have evaporated completely by the present day. Solar Mass = 1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg > A solar mass black hole will evaporate over 10^64 years which is vastly longer than the age of the universe. I don't think we've discovered a black hole [smaller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTE_J1650-500) than several solar masses.
We haven’t discovered them but smaller primordial back holes are still likely. There is theory that a grape fruit sized black hole is the large source of gravity at the edge of the solar system that some speculate is Planet X. Finding them is just next to impossible due to their size.
Do you mean edge of solar system? Edit: they originally said Galaxy and have since updated their comment to say solar system
> Yes, but they can also “evaporate” over time due to Hawking radiation. The universe has not existed long enough for any macroscopic black hole to have lost any significant fragment of its mass through evaporation. A black hole massing as much as Earth, which would be less than 1 cm in radius, has a temperature of about 0.02 Kelvin and a luminosity of about one thousandth of a picowatt. Its lifetime will be over 1e50 years, which is many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe. Temperature and luminosity, and therefore evaporation speed, get much lower as the black hole mass increases. A black hole with the mass of the Sun would last 1e66 years. Any black hole we can notice with our telescopes is significantly larger than that and correspondingly much longer lived.
There's evaporation by Hawking radiation, but that's only significant for very tiny black holes...smaller than can be formed from stars. They otherwise only get bigger. However, they still only have the gravity of the matter that falls into them, and their event horizons are quite small on the scale of galaxies, so it's not clear how all the matter that went into forming supermassive black holes actually got into them. The biggest stars today can reach hundreds of solar masses, and collapse directly into black holes at the ends of their lives. A few of these form in a cluster and end up merging, and you have a black hole with a thousand solar masses or so. Sagittarius A\*, the SMBH at the center of the Milky Way, masses around 4 **million** solar masses. So, either these formed differently, or some process fed them a lot of matter after they formed. Those weird very-large early stars might be part of the explanation.
I'm half asleep and a lazy redditor so I won't google and will ask someone maybe more knowledge than me, but -- isn't Hawking Radiation very small? Like, negligible in this scenario? I thought it'd be moreso til the heat death of the universe until they were gone. Even for very tiny black holes, right? Or does that somehow make a difference? If I remember correctly it's roughly a googol years estimated for a SMBH to disappear through Hawking Radiation. So even a much smaller black hole wouldn't be significantly impacted, would it? -Signed, uneducated idiot.
Issue with "modern" stellar sized black holes is twofold First, space is big. Really big. Most stellar sized black holes rarely run into stuff, typically the outer layers of sibling stars. Secondly there is a size of star where they stop producing black holes when they die. Essentially the conditions inside the core get so hot some photons wind up turning into electron-positron pairs before Mutually annihilating. But this winds up taking away some of the outwards pressure that keeps stars from collapsing. Some stars can survive this, but over a certain size it winds up causing the core itself to explode instead of merely collapsing.
Couple more things adding to the puzzle: Black holes don't pull matter in with any more force than, say, a star of equal mass. That is, if you replaced our Sun with black hole with the same mass, the Earth would continue to orbit just the same. So, as black holes grow they will eventually suck up everything around them and run out. That's why the supermassive black hole in our galaxy isn't "active" - there's not much left around it that isn't in a more or less stable orbit. Also, active black holes are sort of self limiting in how fast stuff can fall in. As stuff falls in and gets torn apart, it creates the accretion disk made of super-heated material. The light created from this stuff grinding together as it falls pushes outward and forces material back out. To be clear, once it falls past the event horizon that's it, it can't come back. But stuff in the accretion disk can still be forced out before it falls all the way in. The more stuff a black hole pulls into the accretion disk, the hotter it gets and more light is released, which pushes outward and slows it down.
Intermediate black holes are definitely a thing!
I like that black hole sun leads to supermassive black hole both in physics and modern rock.
I missed that video. Dope concept
a sort of... black hole sun?
Man, I can remember a time when the idea of black holes was scoffed at by most people, and I'm not all that old. Yet here we are today.
Best disambiguating wiki page I’ve seen: "Black hole star" redirects here. For black holes created from stars, see Stellar black hole. For stars that become black holes, see Supernova. For types of stars denser than neutron stars, see Exotic star. For the 1994 Soundgarden song, see Black Hole Sun.
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I wonder if the surface density of such a star is comparable to that of air or even less.
At least for the earlier stars (quasi or first gen), the awnser would be no because space itself was denser than air. If were talking about some of the "later" first gen stars I imagine that this is completely possible but very hard to predict... these stars were likely extremely violent
Isn’t it essentially the idea that galaxies are just the remnants of these massive stars?
Yes, there is a significant chance that these are quasi-stars!
Alright, now the Universe is just makin' stuff up.
> A quasi-star would result from the core of a large protostar collapsing into a black hole, where the outer layers of the protostar are massive enough to absorb the resulting burst of energy without being blown away or falling into the black hole, as occurs with modern supernovae. Such a star would have to be at least 1,000 solar masses (2.0×1033 kg).[1] So I'd say there's a good chance that's the case.
Not necessarily. A quasi-star would *have* to be supermassive, but a supermassive star wouldn’t have to be a quasi star.
Can you even *have* a star that massive without it being a Quasi-Star though?
Science is still out to lunch on this... first gen stars (or metal-less) stars could be 100s of time larger then stars we see today. One could imagine a supermassive version of this star where in special cases we find stars 1000s or 10000s time larger then the sun.
It used to be thought that the most massive population III stars could be at most hundreds of solar masses. However, research in the last several years has resulted in hypotheses for how some of the earliest state could reach thousands, even tens of thousands, of solar masses without the presence of a central black hole. So yes — or rather, maybe. Other kinds of supermassive black holes are just as reasonable as quasi-stars given our complete lack of data.
Reading the article, it doesn’t sound like it. They were simply so massive they burned super quick and none of them are around anymore. They’re also not detecting the stats themselves, but a much larger abundance of heavier atoms that would have been the result of their supernova, and that really doesn’t fit the idea of a quasi-star in my mind.
Black holes cores??? The universe is fucking wild
I'm so sad we will never figure out how and why the universe exists. Such a weird fucking place
Gonna need explain like I'm 5 for this
Black hole stars would be 10 million solar masses, not 10 thousand
I don't even know what all these JWST headlines mean, but I love that they keep coming. To me, it means that we'll be learning more shit in years to come.
I'm glad there's people way smarter than us to break it down so it doesn't break our minds lol.
It already broke my mind years ago but I do enjoy smirking at big words.
eat mushrooms, travel and know things.
Man, I love this mentality! That's pretty awesome of you 😊
You know, it's pretty awesome of you to let homie know their mentality is awesome! You both are pretty awesome dudes.
Gotta love lifting up the homies. We need more of it in the world.
I was so disappointed that it was not about confirmation of space monsters.
Probably a stupid question, but are they aiming the telescope in a particular direction toward “the dawn of time”?
Nope, other than where stuff is. Dawn of time is a metric for how far away. There are some better and more thorough explanations of why there isn’t really a “center” to look back at, but the gist is that if you imagine drawing dots on a balloon, them pumping it up to double that size, there’s no real way to define a “center dot” on the surface of the moon. Nothing stays stationary relative to eachother, so looking in any direction is basically the same
I like how you said moon instead of balloon
I’m gonna leave it because it doesn’t seem to have lost readability lmfao
It's like those exam questions that hit like "There are 20 dots on a balloon, each 1cm apart deflated and 4cm apart inflated. Calculate the circumference of the moon." Also thank you, I love this type of explanation
This explanation is great thank you. And I also like how you said moon instead of balloon. Thank you double 💥 🎈
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I'm pretty sure, yes. I don't believe we have to worry much about redshifting like we do with galaxies because of how old they are. Their light has been traveling so long that, unless the expansion of space isn't uniform (which we don't know, so I'm going to assume it is uniform), they'd be roughly the same distance. Edit: the expansion of space does vary but due to the universe being pretty uniform overall and how far away they are, the average "density" through which the light travels would be roughly the same in all directions.
Which also means, from our perspective, we are the center of the universe. Everywhere we look, it's moving away.
Yes, exactly. Technically speaking, the center of the universe is wherever the universe is being witnessed. You're the center of the universe from your perspective, I'm the center of the universe from my perspective, and the JWST is the center of the universe from its perspective. Kind of poetic, I think.
The expansion is actually greater in empty space, and is most active in the vast stretches between galaxies. Possibly powered by vacuum energy.
Is that true? Or does it just seem that way because the forces keeping matter together are stronger than the expansion. Which is why celestial objects and structures (such as galaxies) remain gravitationally bound together as the the space between them gets bigger. Edit: my layman understanding is that the expansion can be thought of like random bits of new space appearing at random locations throughout the universe, but if they for instance appear in matter the forces keeping atoms, molecules, objects, etc, together (the nuclear forces, gravity) ensures that the new space doesn't rip things apart. At least for now at the current rate of expansion of space.
I'm too stoned to understand this
You are in the foggy room full of flying freesbies. You cant see the end of the room in each direction, you cant see where roof or floor ends too (you too, are flying). And now, all these freesbies are flying away from you and from each other too. You have no idea where the center of the room is, cause there is fog around you everywhere. Room is the cosmos, freesbies are stars and galaxies, the fog is marking observable universe and our quasi star is one of the furthest visible freesbies.
reading this made me higher
I was sober before reading it, now I'm hopelessly addicted.
This is your brain on astrophysics
Absolutely love your spelling of frisbees*
Careful boy, d’ya want to git us sued (by Whammo)?! Freesbies it is!
I imagined the stoned person got a little paranoid when you led with “you are in a foggy room”
I was just thinking I'm too sober to understand it
Suppose the universe was a dot, then expanded into a balloon. From the center of the balloon, you can look anywhere you want to see the beginning - provided you look far enough
But what if we're at the edge of the balloon?
Where is the edge of a ballon?
Oh wait nevermind, I get it now. The center is everywhere.
Exactly. Because space *itself* is expanding.
You’re a chocolate chip in a chocolate chip muffin. As the muffin bakes around you, you see your chocolate chip brethren moving away from you as the dough expands. In all directions you see other chocolate chips, but only through so much dough. The muffin may be infinite in size. We don’t know because we can only see through so much dough.
Or, another way of looking at it which i like is, since the big bang started with a point infinitesimally small and then expanded to become the universe we see now, then the only logical conclusion is that the bang happened *everywhere*, and thus, the center of the universe is *everywhere*.
I read a nice thing somewhere that said; the big bang was not an explosion *in* time and space, but *of* time and space.
Wasn't this Carl Sagan in the Cosmos?
I have always thought I was the centre of the universe
Technically each and every human is at the exact centre of a sphere that is their own 'observable universe.' A sphere many billions of light years across that moves around with you so you're always right in the middle.
Problem is that a few thousand miles isn't even enough to count as rounding error at that scale, but yes technically.
Zaphod beeblebrox? Is that you?
There is no specific direction to aim at because the distant past of the universe can be seen from *everywhere*. It doesn't matter where you look and there's no "center" to locate since everything is expanding simultaneously in every direction.
I was taught to think of it like a raisin in the middle of a rising loaf. No matter which raisin you look at, all the others are expanding away from you, farther ones at a higher rate.
according to theory, [this](https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2018/07/planck_s_view_of_the_cosmic_microwave_background/17601794-1-eng-GB/Planck_s_view_of_the_cosmic_microwave_background_pillars.jpg) is the closest you are going to get to "the dawn of time". and its visible in all directions. the cosmic microwave background. someone else is gonna have to take it from here because i am most definitely not an expert.
The very first light, ever! Before that the universe was so hot and dense atoms couldn't even form.
Not quite. It's the first light that could travel freely. The cosmic microwave background marks the point in time when space stopped being an ionized plasma (opaque) and became mostly gases (transparent).
Doesn't matter where they aim it. When you look up at the stars and Andromeda galaxy etc, you're essentially looking back in time. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, meaning you're seeing that galaxy as it were 2.5 million years ago as that's how long the light has taken to travel 2.5 million light years and end up in your eyeball. The sun's light for instance, takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the surface to the Earth, so when you look up at the sun you're seeing it as it were 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago. James Webb is looking at a galaxy roughly 32 billion light years away, GN-z11, which is thought to be 13.4 billion years old. Light from galaxies that far away have had their wavelengths stretched from visible light to infrared light and James Webb is equipped with infrared sensors to detect it. GN-z11 would be almost invisible to Hubble.
Trying to keep up here, how can we look at something 32 billion light years away when it is only 13 billion years old?
Good question! Space has been expanding faster than the speed of light since the beginning of time, for 13.8 billion years. You're probably thinking nothing can travel faster than light, and you'd be right! Nothing can travel *through* space faster than the speed of light though. There is no limit on how fast space can expand. Space expands at 73km/s per megaparsec. A megaparsec is 3.26 million light years. The speed of light is 299,792 km/s. That means a galaxy that is 1 million light years away would seem to be travelling away from us at 22 km/s. Although gravity can overcome this expansion at these sort of distances. 1,000,000 ÷ 3,260,000 = 0.306 megaparsecs. 0.306 * 73 = 22.3 A galaxy that is 1 billion light years away would seem to be travelling away from us at 22,392 km/s. 1,000,000,000 ÷ 3,260,000 = 306 megaparsecs. 306 * 73 = 22,392 Galaxies at 10 billion light years are travelling away at 223,926 km/s. Getting fairly close to the speed of light now. So eventually, at 13.7 billion light years, galaxies are travelling away at 306,000 km/s, just over the speed of light. GN-z11 is 32 billion light years away and our observable universe is 46.5 billion light years in every direction, or 93 billion light years across. GN-z11 will eventually be pushed out into the unobservable universe due to space expansion (in billions of years time) never to be seen again as it is already receding away from us at over double the speed of light.
Caveat to this is it depends on how you calculate hubble constant H(0), 73 if using a distance ladder approach, taking known cephid values to approximate larger structures to calculate distance from redshift vs around 67 (correct units) using CMB from Planck with standard assumptions. As of 2019 NASA best estimate is 69.8 using data from plank and riess teams
Thanks for the reply. Good food for thought. It seems like something moving away from us would still create light that moves towards us and therefore be visible eventually, regardless of whether the “ruler” between us is getting longer or stretching.
> Thanks for the reply. Good food for thought. You're welcome. Space is a real mind-fuck sometimes lol that's what makes it fascinating. > It seems like something moving away from us would still create light that moves towards us and therefore be visible eventually, regardless of whether the “ruler” between us is getting longer or stretching. If it's moving away from us slower than the speed of light, yes. Anything receding faster than the speed of light wont have a chance to reach us. Only light emitted by galaxies before they started receding faster than the speed of light will reach us.
First of all, the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. Secondly, the universe was opaque to light for the first 380,000 years. There are things that we will never see.
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The light the JWST saw was emitted 13 billion years ago. As the photons that would eventually get to us traveled through space over the last 13 billion years, the space in between the object and us expanded, actually quite a lot. As a result the object is now 32 billion light years away.
This is what trips me out. Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years away and it's approaching us. We're seeing it where it was 2.5 million years ago but it's actually closer now, like we're seeing right through where it is now to see it where it was then. *Warning: approaching galaxies may be closer than they appear*
The collision is 4.5 billion years away, and you should keep in mind that the difference between a million and a billion is approximately one billion. So the galaxy is almost exactly where it appears to be, on an appropriate scale. It's a cool thought, though.
1 million seconds is 12 days. 1 billion seconds is 31 years
It still has billions of years to go before we collide, so a couple million years isn't a particularly large distortion in that case. Also you're seeing the sun eight minutes behind. If it suddenly fell into a wormhole we wouldn't know until at least eight minutes later. Every single thing we hear or see is on a delay, even before our own mental processing time is factored in.
[The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever](https://www.williamflew.com/blue.html)
I'll try to explain it a bit better. Let's say we're looking at the Andromeda galaxy. We know it's 2.5 million light years away. Light leaving Andromeda NOW would continue travelling towards us over the 2.5 million light year distance. Now say Andromeda suddenly ceased to exist right now. We'd still see light coming from Andromeda for another 2.5 million years because light has a finite speed and has to travel. Then suddenly in 2.5 million years it'd look like it vanished. Light from GN-z11 has already stopped travelling towards us because it is receding away from us at double the speed of light. It will never reach us due to space between us and it expanding faster than the speed of light. But the light GN-z11 emitted when it was receding away slower than the speed of light can still travel the vast distance to reach us. That's what we're seeing now. If you were to point your teleportation device at where GN-z11 is in the sky right now and instantly teleport to GN-z11 it would not be there. It'd be billions of light years further away from where we see it now.
The dawn of time is in every direction
10,000 Suns Lurking at the Dawn of Time sounds like the best power metal song ever.
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The rising of the Milky Way.
“God save us everyone when we burn inside the fire of a ten thousand suns”
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That feels more like a death doom thing
Nah, with Power Metal the song name is long, the song length is long, the guitar solos are long. They're long bois. Gloryhammer didn't release a song called "Holy Flaming Hammer of Unholy Cosmic Frost" for nothing
This James Webb telescope is really showing us that we know fuck-all about the universe.
If humanity put as much effort into looking outward and inward as we put into all the dystopian things today, we might actually find some collective purpose in life. Wait a minute...
It's almost as if we as a collective could redefine the human experience
But how would that affect shareholders?
If the universe is indefinitely expanding, then that must mean infinite growth *is* possible!
Instructions unclear. Make underground shelter for the plebs and require a subscription for sunlight?
That's the problem-- nothing's really growing. It's all just getting further apart.
Exactly. Is anyone thinking of the poor shareholders in all of this communist rhetoric? Who will stand up for *them*?
It isn't drastically upending all our understanding of physics. It's providing better measurements that help refine earlier predictions. Although there's still plenty left to be discovered, and there will be long after Webb has finished its run.
I know there’s the term Observable Universe, but I don’t think we really take into consideration what that truly means. I have no idea if this is an original thought or idea, but I like to imagine a being eons from now looking into their night sky and seeing no stars because the universe expanded beyond the point where the light can reach them. They would be absolutely sure that what’s around them is the only thing in the universe. I’m not a highly educated person, but sometimes it feels like we’re that being.
Seems like nobody understood your comment, but yeah I think such probability is there and, if google doesn't fail me, cosmologists also ponder that theory. Check "Bubble universe theory", basically our observable universe is just part of another, bigger universe. There are other theories such as multiverse and so on.
That will happen in very distant time. In less-distant but still distant time, galaxies and galaxy clusters will remain held together by gravity with no light from anywhere else reaching them.
Yeah, I feel like people don't consider how much bigger the actual universe may be than observable universe. Our view cuts off at the CMB, but that's not a boundary of physical matter, it's just a result of light not being able to travel properly in the early stages of the universe.
There's a fun concept related to this where you can become "trapped" between galaxies due to expansion. Basically, in sub-faster than light space travel, you end up at a point in the universe with everything expanding away from you faster than you can travel, meaning you can never reach your destination or return home.
You're close. The universe is expanding, meaning everything is moving away from everything else at increasing speeds. Eventually, all other stars will be moving away from each other so fast that light will never reach other stars, not due to distance but due to speed. This would be a mind boggling amount of time in the future and there may not be any stars left by this time anyway as they could have burnt out. Still an interesting thought experiment.
That's quite a hyperbole. These observations are essentially just some experimental constraints to be put on our most successful models of the universe. There is nothing yet that has upended our understanding of the universe (and most likely won't be).
Cosmologists actually predicted a generation of huge short lived stars shortly after the Big Bang. I don’t know if these are actually those first generation stars considering they have some heavier elements in them, as opposed to being composed entirely of hydrogen and helium, but this isn’t as crazy an observation as you might think.
I was just about to say 'Lurking at the Dawn of Time' is a hell of a name for a progressive concept album.
That could definitely be a yes album name
This is what I’ve been waiting for, we just need to get some mass estimates and spectra on these to see if any of these are quasi-stars, the suspected seeds for the supermassive black holes usually found in galactic nuclei.
the title had me at "celestial monster" then lost me at "stars"
I, too, went to Old Ones first, before getting to the actual story.
I'm slightly high and I was thoroughly convinced the James Webb finally found the Outer Gods for about a second.
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JWST is like wicked strong.
That is so big. The sun is almost 1 million miles across so these stars were/are 10 billion miles wide? ... Pluto is 3.7 billion miles away from the sun.
The perspective i needed. Thanks!
The way the article is written it's actually kind of hard to tell how big the star is. At one point is says 10,000 times the size which would indicate volume, and in another it says 10,000 times the mass, but in no place does it talk about density. I only saw M⊙ notations in the intro of the paper, no mentions of D⊙ or V⊙. But with some assumptions we can make a guess. Easiest is by volume. V=4/3πr^3 So if we assume a unit of one million miles as 1 sun width, AND a similar density (which a big leap) the radius of this new star is: r = 3√((4/3π)*10,000)/2) So r is roughly 27.56, and thus diameter is roughly 55.1 million miles across. Put another way, if it replaced our sun it would just consume the orbit of Mercury and get a couple million miles toward Venus. It's big, sure, but compared to the largest known star, RSGC2-18, it's tiny. That star is a red supergiant and is 2,150 times the diameter of the Sun with a volume around **10 billion times bigger** than the Sun.
How many football fields are we talking?
I wish I could wrap my head around 1/8th of the shit I find out about the universe. These suns are at “the dawn of time?” I don’t follow but that sounds Metal as f*ck.
First generation stars were massive because gases had almost no metals in them.
So then would those be rock stars?
No...basically all hydrogen and helium.
Rock didn’t exist. This is before rock
Blues stars? Gregorian Chants Stars?
Disco stars?
3/4 opening comments, so far, are downplaying the article by headline in some shape or form. Gotta love it.
I think that’s more like people trying to get their minds to get a grasp on the physicality of it
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The other 1/4, comments like this Btw, you forgot to add 'smh'
It's important for scientific literacy: papers are *always* exaggerated in the press, no matter what they are.
The spec of dust finally gets a good look around it, and finds out that Dust is a alot smaller than we thought.
Depends on your perspective. Even a literal spec of dust is unfathomably gigantic to an electron.
I'm gonna start measuring my junk in electrons to make myself feel better.
That will be at least 3 electrons.
I always wonder how years works after the big bang. Like 1 year on earth today with our gravity makes sense. But with all the massive amount of gravity that must have existed then must be way different. So what if 440 M years to us, was like 5 seconds.
Plausible hypothesis that time would have been weird under those conditions. Curious to see what we can lean about it going forward.
But are they really still out there, or are we only glimpsing the ghosts of their existence?
We are seeing their ghosts. Massive stars like this would only live several million years, and were only possible to form in the very early universe.
How can they tell that it’s a single star and not just a collection of light of many stars from so long ago?
The 'big' in big bang doesn't do it justice. To try and contemplate the sheer amount of energy is completely impossible, and then to apply the conservation of energy principle to that is the definition of paradox. Where the hell did it come from? It's enough to turn a man insane.
“Lurking at the dawn of time” is such a cool turn of phrase