Sinable 3 months ago
This honestly scared me... I can hardly comprehend the idea of something that massive...
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zolikoff 4 weeks ago
Something "that massive" is just as massive as an ordinary star. The difference is that it's really small.
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Sinable 4 weeks ago
+zolikoff A few weeks ago, scientists discovered another black hole in our galaxy, and determined that it is roughly 20 BILLION times the size of our own Sun. Now that... is pretty big :D
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zolikoff 4 weeks ago
+Sinable Yes, those a supermassive black holes, not stellar black holes like the one in the video. A stellar black hole is born out of a star, and is thus at most a few dozen solar masses. Supermassives grow to a huge size by consuming a lot of matter over time.
It wasn't in our galaxy, though. The largest in our galaxy is the central black hole, Sagittarius A*, which is "only" 4 million solar masses.
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Sinable 4 weeks ago
+zolikoff Ah, ok. Thats cool! :D
Thanks for sharing that, I didn't know I was wrong.
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gbushimprov 3 weeks ago (edited)
+Sinable +zolikoff Also from merging with other black holes. Although they're not billions of times bigger than the sun, they're billions of times more massive. More mass. The one at the centre of our galaxy is a lot bigger than the Sun but thousands times, not billions.
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Elmdran Dev 3 weeks ago
+zolikoff The one Sinable was talking about likely collided with other black holes as (from what I understand) black holes radiate their energy as radioactive waves and decrease in time
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zolikoff 3 weeks ago (edited)
+Elmdran Dev Yes, black holes do emit Hawking radiation, and thus, lose energy (i.e. mass) over time. But the larger the black hole, the smaller the intensity of emitted radiation (because it depends on the gravitational field at the event horizon, which is weaker, the larger the black hole).
As you probably know, the universe is permeated by the cosmic microwave background, which has a temperature of about 3K.
As long as the black hole's emission is "cooler" than the CMB, it doesn't lose mass over time; it gains it (because it also eats the CMB).
For this reason, in order for a massive black hole to start decreasing in mass, the universe has to cool down first below the Hawking radiation temperature threshold.
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James Mc Fabulous 1 week ago
Just imagine your mother
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Sinable 6 days ago
+James Mc Fabulous Immature idiot confirmed
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James Mc Fabulous 6 days ago
+Sinable Don't be so down on yourself, buddy. Just because you can't comprehend black holes doesn't make you stupid. If you want to understand them better than just PICTURE YOUR ASS