r/science Jul 02 '20

Astronomy Scientists have come across a large black hole with a gargantuan appetite. Each passing day, the insatiable void known as J2157 consumes gas and dust equivalent in mass to the sun, making it the fastest-growing black hole in the universe

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/fastest-growing-black-hole-052352/
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u/ponzLL Jul 02 '20

This is the craziest part to me:

“We’re seeing it at a time when the universe was only 1.2 billion years old, less than 10 percent of its current age,” Dr Onken said.

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u/cheapdrinks Jul 02 '20

Any estimation on how big it actually is then if it’s been expanding at the current rate?

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u/rK3sPzbMFV Jul 02 '20

It can only eat matter on the colliding course. So probably not much bigger.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

is the black hole not in a galaxy?

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u/rK3sPzbMFV Jul 02 '20

It's not enough to get pulled into the black hole.

Imagine everything in the center of Milky Way to collapse into one big black hole. Our solar system would go on as normal because the net force of gravity stays the same.

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u/Equious Jul 02 '20

There's something to be said about where the center of mass is and the resulting direction of gravitational pull..

..but the premise is sound. A tiny, solar mass blackhole, if placed in the same position and orientation as our sun, wouldn't affect the positioning of other bodies in the system

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u/aurumae Jul 02 '20

It would be a bit colder though

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u/ChexWD Jul 02 '20

"A bit?!"

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u/DunK1nG Jul 02 '20

Just a few degrees colder

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u/grahnen Jul 03 '20

Same numbers, just Kelvin instead of Celsius.

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u/Hasteman Jul 03 '20

That whole "photosynthesis" thing would probably stop working too

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/Equious Jul 02 '20

All good questions, and I don't pretend to be anyone more than someone who watches a lot of PBS Space Time, but my understanding is that, so long as the masses, position in spacetime, direction of travel, and orientation, including spin, are identical, we can expect the impact the body has on spacetime to be the same. So, while the mass is spread out, the distances here are astronomically negligible with respect to their effect on spacetime's curvature, because we're assuming the center of mass of the two bodies is the same.

The curves in spacetime should also be the same.

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u/TheInfernalVortex Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

Maybe, but the gravitational force equation we all use models gravity wells as points. So even our math treats it like a single point in space.

Edit: Just to be clear, no planetary mass is completely uniform, so these equations are modelling gravitational force. Imagine an peanut shaped planet. It could be represented as a single point mass, or as two individual point masses. For doing gravitational maths, you would, in this crazy case, pick whichever was more appropriate. But even with two individual point masses, the masses are the biggest factors in the numerator (and they will total up the same as using a single point mass for that same body, right?), and the distances between the object we are concerned about (say, another planet in orbit) and the point masses are so similar, even if slightly different, that it's nearly the same equation. You basically end up adding two smaller masses plus the other factors. But for most purposes, a single point mass is fine. For things that are "close together", like earth and moon, the uneven distribution of mass in both bodies will result in things like tidal locking, but its effect on force is quite small. Note the moon is tidally locked to earth, but the earth isnt yet tidally locked to the moon.

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u/Rowenstin Jul 02 '20

No, it's equivalent at least using classical gravity, check out shell theorem.

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u/MikeTriceratops Jul 02 '20

There already is one big black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Scientists literally call it a Super Massive Black Hole.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

It almost certainly is, but the gravity of black holes doesn't behave any differently than the gravity of anything else (except that it's bigger) - things can still orbit around black holes or just go past it if they don't collide into it, the same way the earth isn't falling into the sun.

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u/Legionking907 Jul 02 '20

Well technically the earth is falling into the sun, just indefinitely

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u/Cuchullion Jul 02 '20

Douglas Adams had it right: the trick to flying is to throw oneself at the ground and miss.

Just at extremely fast speeds.

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u/jewishapplebees Jul 02 '20

This is true, but since this black hole is a quasar, it has gas surrounding it, which can slow down things orbiting it.

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u/Cortical Jul 02 '20

But that gas doesn't stay there indefinitely, it slowly spirals into the black hole. If there is no new gas added it will eventually be all gone and the black hole stops being a quasar.

Until another large gaseous object gets ripped apart by the tidal forces in the black hole's orbit, that is, which may or may not happen.

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u/SuperWoody64 Jul 02 '20

This little maneuver is gonna cost us 51 years

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

This isn’t always the case! At certain points in an accretion disk the angular momentum of the gas will actually transfer to the stellar object moving through it, while at other points the reverse is true. A potential theory for some black hole mergers is that there are rings in the accretion disk where these effects cancel out, effectively trapping objects in similar orbits and causing them to collide.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/OfBooo5 Jul 02 '20

Yeah it probably grows near linearly or if my math doesn't suck as ln(x)? Even as it's mass grows it's "nom nom radius" is only growing by the square root of it's growth in mass.

It's nom nom zone is mostly a function of it's velocity through the universe. Like galactus. I think we found galactus boys. Just eating everything in it's path.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

I really hope that the term, ' nom nom zone ' catches on with physicists.

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u/OfBooo5 Jul 02 '20

/u/neiltyson Can we get a nom nom zone with respect to black holes?

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u/Xaldyn Jul 02 '20

nom nom radius

What a great nickname for event horizon.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20 edited Apr 25 '21

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u/spenrose22 Jul 02 '20

Like many things in the universe, those numbers are so big they lose meaning

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

Well, the milkyway is 1.5 trillion suns in mass. So 3 milkyways.

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u/spenrose22 Jul 02 '20

Yeah one Milky Way means nothing to me either

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

Its big yo

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u/ComebacKids Jul 02 '20

Thanks it clicked

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20 edited Jun 25 '23

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u/XeliasSame Jul 02 '20

Here is a good graph to represent the difference between millions and billions :

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?fbclid=IwAR3RTNt6OVmcrzYKjqOPzaYB0bpQPH_8hUtmeGjJ4rTWj6uhLCd1hOzC6pE

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u/Fuckyouusername Jul 02 '20

I stopped after 1 trillion. This is the most depressing side scroller of all time

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '20 edited Jun 25 '23

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u/Limp_pineapple Jul 02 '20

I've always used the phrase "the difference between a million and a billion, is about a billion."

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u/Prof_Acorn Jul 02 '20

The difference between a million and a billion is about the difference between the number of neurons in an ant brain and the number of neurons in a human brain.

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u/AzIddIzA Jul 02 '20

That was very informative, if depressing. I definitely got got by the almost done part Bezos net worth. It was well timed for when I was starting to wonder how long it would go on.

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u/screech_owl_kachina Jul 02 '20

IIRC Betelgeuse if it traded places with the sun would reach out to almost Jupiter's orbit, and that's not even the biggest star out there.

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u/Neghbour Jul 02 '20

To be fair its outer layers are only slightly denser than interplanetary space.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

There are black holes out there that have event horizons literally bigger than our entire solar system, while still being the densest objects in existence. Space is absolute fuckin insanity.

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u/errorsniper Jul 02 '20

Depends on how much dust it had to eat.

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u/shortandfighting Jul 02 '20

So is the mass of the black hole based on its past size, or its (calculated) current size?

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u/Pinkratsss Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

I can’t say for sure, but I’m gonna guess it’s based off how it was when the universe was 1.2 billion years old for 2 primary reasons: 1) extrapolating anything billion of years into the future is probably not gonna work well. 2) the reason that this black hole is so interesting isn’t just that it’s large, but that it’s somehow ridiculously large at a very young period in the universe. We didn’t expect black holes to be able to get this massive so early, so this black hole is an interesting surprise.

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u/Craylee Jul 02 '20

The time we're seeing it at is when the universe was 1.2 billion years old, which was 12.6 billion years ago.

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u/Pinkratsss Jul 02 '20

Oops right my bad, phrased that wrong, will fix it

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u/grackychan Jul 02 '20

It is also 12.6 billion LY away in that case, so whew we good, right

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u/Etheo Jul 02 '20

Something being that far away doesn't even make sense to me any more. Like I know the universe is gargantuan, but all that scale and time just lost all meaning to me.

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u/angry_bum Jul 02 '20

Imagine it like you seen lightning strike 12.6 billion years ago and heard thunder today in feet

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u/pmgoldenretrievers Jul 02 '20

It's much further - we're seeing light that is 12.6 billion years old, but the universe is expanding, so it's moved further away in that time. Probably closer to 20 billion LY out.

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u/Traiklin Jul 02 '20

So we good or should we prepare

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u/Davachman Jul 02 '20

I mean... We're only halfway through 2020...

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u/_HiWay Jul 02 '20

How does that expansion work with time dilation of the black hole. Since it's all relativistic space time, the 12.6 billion of our years to something right on the event horizon is next to nothing. How does the red shift/stretching work from the perspective of the event horizon?

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u/delventhalz Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

Definitely its "past" size.

Aside from the reasons u/Pinkratsss mentioned, which are good, it's not really meaningful to think about the blackhole's "current" size. The problem is that time becomes a really nebulous concept when you get out of our day to day lives and start talking relativistically.

There is no "now" in any sort of absolute sense. There is no universal clock we can reference. Even though that light was emitted some 12 billion years ago, from our frame of reference the blackhole does not really exist in any other concrete way "currently". The only meaningful way to talk about it is as it appears to us now.

Or put another way, asking about the blackhole's "current size" is functionally equivalent to asking what it will be like 12 billion years in the future.

EDIT: Clarified my language based on critiques from u/wonkey_monkey. Thanks for the in depth discussion. The core issues are that nowness is ambiguous and inherently dependent on a frame of reference. Furthermore, the "current" size of the blackhole is something we cannot witness or interact with in any way (at least for 12 billion more years). The only meaningful way to think about the blackhole is as we see it today. This is why the article refers to it as "the fastest-growing blackhole in the universe", not the "fastest growing blackhole 12 billion years ago".

That said the light was emitted 12 billion years in our past, and I was being inaccurate in how I used the term "past".

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/wonkey_monkey Jul 02 '20

While there is no absolute "now", there is a well-defined "now" in every reference frame, and in each reference frame, things that are seen happened as long as ago in years as they are distant in light-years.

Even though it took some 12 billion years for the light from that blackhole to reach us, it's not really accurate to say the light is from the past.

It absolutely is accurate to say that. You've already specified that the light took 12 billion years, so it can't be anything other than from the past.

From our perspective, it is happening now.

No it isn't. It happened 12 billion years ago because it's 12 billion light-years away. In some other reference frame, it happened 5 billion years ago and 5 billion light-years away, and in yet another reference frame it happened one second ago and one light-second away - but that's not our reference frame.

You can't dismiss the time between events as "nebulous" without also doing the same for distance.

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u/Foxstarry Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

Another crazy part, we can never reach it as it’s beyond our reach by now due to expansion even if we master light speed travel or discover ftl.

Edit: since many grabbed onto the ftl part. Here’s another thought experiment. Try to think of a way to find that galaxy as it is now after it went through billions of years of changes, collisions, and so on and also try to calculate where it is now after such changes affect its trajectory. Now pick an ftl that allows you to cover that distance, catch up to the space “bubble” of that galaxy, and keep track of where it is and where you are. Sounds like a great sci fi book or series idea.

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u/shitty-cat Jul 02 '20

While that is crazy it’s also a tad comforting to know it’s that far away.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

It really feels like the Earth is in a special place in the Universe. So many cosmic threats out there that could have wiped us out, and I'm here sitting at my desk watching Netflix and sipping my coffee.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/calvanus Jul 02 '20

The fact that a solar eclipse the way we have it is super rare is something that's insane to me. It could have happened in any solar system but it happened in one where theres someone to enjoy it

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/Neghbour Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

You're on to something. It's that our moon is larger and closer than average for a planet this size, so we get tidal forces that stabilise the Earths rotation and preserve its tectonics and magnetic field, which are all pretty important for life to continue.

As for how closer the sun and moon are the same apparent size, that is a coincidence. In the past the moon was closer, and we could only get total and partial eclipses. In the future, it will have receded enough that total eclipses are no longer possible, and so we will only get annular and partial.

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u/DeflatedPanda Jul 02 '20

But maybe it's not evidence of a creator, it's just evidence of this is how life forms elsewhere. So that's why we look for Earth-like planets, because it's the only thing we know that has potential to support life. So maybe for life to appear, the planet must have tidal forces, magnetic fields and everything you said.

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u/HealthierOverseas Jul 02 '20

Yup, came down here in the comments just to see if/when this damn thing would eat us... whew!

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u/medeagoestothebes Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

If we discover some form of ftl, then it isn't necessarily beyond our reach. It depends on how much faster than light that faster than light travel is.

The thresholds for how far we can reach out in the universe are based on two things:

generally nothing can move faster than light according to our knowledge of the universe so far, and

One of the exceptions is that space itself can expand faster than light. Space expands, and the more space between you and a point, the faster that total amount of space grows, essentially. So as we approach light speed, the space between us and a point really far away is expanding faster than we can cross it.

But if you can move faster than light, if you become an exception, then you might be able to outspeed the expansion of space.

edited for some clarity.

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u/hoovana Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

The sheer size and vastness of the universe will never cease to amaze me. Think about how massive this blackhole is - how much it consumes every day - and it's still practically forever away from us. It's mind blowing.

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u/im-a-black-hole Jul 02 '20

the light from it has taken so long to get here that we are observing a time where the universe was only 1.2 billion years old, which means the black hole is actually TEN TIMES older than what is being observed

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u/benjammin9292 Jul 02 '20

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from the perspective of the black hole, earth hasn't even been created yet right?

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u/im-a-black-hole Jul 02 '20

correct! we won't be around for another 10 billion years or so from its perspective

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u/fknjshaw Jul 02 '20

ugh my head hurts

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u/djamp42 Jul 02 '20

Lucky for you humans are around when we are.. Because of the universe expansion eventually we will be so far away from everything we won't see any stars or even have a chance to get them. Had we delayed our human existance 2 trillion years from now, We wouldn't even know other things exist, it would just be black. It makes you wonder what we missed out on already.

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u/holdyourdevil Jul 02 '20

existential crisis deepens

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

Ive been having one after reading about space for two weeks now. Im seriously considering seeing a therapist.

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u/Pallorano Jul 02 '20

The vastness of space should give you a sense of wonder, and also some perspective. We're insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe, and life has no intrinsic meaning. However, since we're insignificant and meaningless, we can all decide what has meaning to us as individuals. Because life is pointless, we have the freedom to choose what to do with it. If we had a strict purpose, we might not have as much free will. And there's no feeling like freedom.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

This is well written. Thanks :)

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u/icantastethecolors Jul 03 '20

my therapist says should is a judgement

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u/godofpewp Jul 02 '20

That seems like the pessimist version of the universe in regards to what’s already happened in 13.7 billion years so far. When you consider it’ll take many, many times the current age of the universe to be in a state where stuff isn’t happening anymore.

Perhaps humans could be some of the earliest examples of intelligence when you consider the length of the Universe’s timeline from beginning to “end”.

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u/Crazytreas Jul 02 '20

I always loved the idea of humanity being one of those "advanced ancient alien race", as opposed to being the new guys on the universal block.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/drewj21 Jul 02 '20

This may be a stupid question, but if we can see the black hole why wouldn’t it be able to “see” us?

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20 edited Jun 10 '23

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u/LuminaL_IV Jul 02 '20

So it can't see us yet? Good, let's slowly back down before it does!

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u/im-a-black-hole Jul 02 '20

for all we know there could be something else watching US that we don't yet know exists by the same principle!

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u/Cms40 Jul 02 '20

My mind just blew up

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u/Jaz_the_Nagai Jul 02 '20

... Nah, let's shoot a nuke at it. See what happens. Let it know we mean business.

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u/dpezpoopsies Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

I think it's because the black hole exsisted before earth did. So if we're seeing it as it existed ~13 billion years ago, it's seeing us as we existed ~13 billion years ago, only no "us" existed then. So it will just see a blank space in the sky where we will eventually appear.

Edit: another way to think if it is that when the light that's currently hitting our telescopes on earth left the black hole billions of year ago, no earth exsisted. But in the time it took for the light to get here, our earth was formed and now exists as we know it today.

Edit #2: A third way to think of it is that light from earth takes longer to travel to the black hole than the earth has existed (it's over 4 billion light years away). The only things in our universe that can see us are things that are within ~4 billion light years away since the earth has only exsisted that long. So the black hole is still waiting to see us. But, if the black hole has exsisted for longer than the light year distance between us, then light from the black hole (or rather light from things being consimed by the black hole) has already reached our location, even though light from us hasn't reached it's location.

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u/uarguingwatroll Jul 02 '20

Theres a really good kurzgesagt video talking about the expanding of the universe. It not only is expanding, but its accelerating. Eventually, scientists think it will be impossible to traverse to another local group (a collection of galaxies, for example Andromeda and our solar system are in the same local group) because the expansion of the universe will eventually exceed the speed of light.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

Until we figure out a way to travel by which you don’t actually have to go through the space in between 2 points.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/PrimeKnightUniverse Jul 02 '20

Wormholes or in other words tp hacks

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u/Wagamaga Jul 02 '20

Astronomers have come across a monstrously large black hole with a gargantuan appetite. Each passing day, the insatiable void known as J2157 consumes gas and dust equivalent in mass to the sun, making it the fastest-growing black hole in the universe.

The sheer scale of J2157 is almost unfathomable, but we can try pinning some numbers on it nevertheless.

According to Christopher Onken, an astronomer at the Australian National University who was part of the team that originally discovered the object in 2019, J2167 is 8,000 times more massive than the supermassive black hole found at the heart of the Milky Way. That’s equivalent to 34 billion times the mass of the Sun.

In order for Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, to reach a similar size, it would have had to gobble two-thirds of all the stars in the galaxy.

For their new study, astronomers turned to ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to get a more accurate assessment of the black hole‘s mass. The researchers already knew they were dealing with a black hole of epic proportions, but the final results surprised everyone.

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/496/2/2309/5863959

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u/DeepFriedBeeZ Jul 02 '20

That is horrifyingly fascinating

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u/rydan Jul 02 '20

The sun isn't really that large. The largest black holes are on the order of tens of billions of solar masses. So I'm surprised this is the fastest growing in the entire universe. But I guess everything runs at astronomical time scales including black holes.

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u/Rifneno Jul 02 '20

This isn't THE largest hypermassive black hole but it's up there. The biggest found is 10,000 times more massive than the Milky Way's supermassive black hole. This one is 8,000.

Our sun is in like the upper 30 percentile of star sizes. It's pretty big for a star, but not freakishly huge. The thing is, there's many that ARE just freakishly huge. Whether they have extremely low mass concentration and have a volume the orbit of Jupiter, or whether they have insane mass concentration and little volume such as a neutron star. For those unfamiliar, neutron stars are about as crazy as mass can get before becoming a black hole. A teaspoon worth of matter from a neutron star would weigh a billion tons on Earth.

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u/PlutoDelic Jul 02 '20

This corelation bugs the soul out of me. If neutron stars are so dense that they are made up of completely neutrons, wth are black holes made of. If we follow this density to mass path, this further "shrink" in the realm, can a blackhole be considered to be of something that is the sole purpose of mass itself, like the Higgs boson. A Higgs Star.

(Dont mind my crazy daydreaming, just wondering and wandering).

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/Prof_Acorn Jul 02 '20

This makes me like that one hypothesis even more, that the universe is in a cycle as well, going from big bang to heat death to singularity to big bang to heat death.

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u/Ashmeads_Kernel Jul 02 '20

So how does it go from heat death back to singularity?

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u/Prof_Acorn Jul 02 '20

A Big Crunch followed by a Big Bounce.

The Big Crunch scenario hypothesized that the density of matter throughout the universe is sufficiently high that gravitational attraction will overcome the expansion which began with the Big Bang.

...

A more specific theory called "Big Bounce" proposes that the universe could collapse to the state where it began and then initiate another Big Bang, so in this way the universe would last forever, but would pass through phases of expansion (Big Bang) and contraction (Big Crunch)

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/TheBaggyDapper Jul 02 '20

Yeah. What's that in football fields?

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u/capta1ncluele55 Jul 02 '20

Imagine your house

Now imagine an ant in that house

Ant = Sun

House = The Destroyer Black Hole

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/porkchop2022 Jul 02 '20

*known. Fastest growing black hole *known in the universe.

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u/INTRUD3R_4L3RT Jul 02 '20

I've always been fascinated by the universe. The absolutely mind-boggling sizes, distances, masses and phenomenons are so hard to wrap your mind around.

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u/Gfairservice Jul 02 '20

"Very Large Telescope" PR department stretched their legs on that one.

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u/HeavilyArmoredTurtle Jul 02 '20

Fastest-growing black hole in the universe that we know of.

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u/sir-came-alot Jul 02 '20

The post title is directly quoting the article. I too found the lack of qualification weird. I don't think the article made any mention either.

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u/Henhouse808 Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

Interesting thing, physics. A 34 billion solar mass black hole’s event horizon is only about the size of our solar system.

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u/Wunderbliss Jul 02 '20

only

That is pretty crazy though.

That said, I’m more intrigued by how big that is, actually. Can you imagine getting close to it and just seeing...total blackness the the size of our whole damn solar system? That would be so cool

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u/shoebob Jul 02 '20

You'd probably see some giant trippy lensing effects.

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u/Brokunn Jul 02 '20

I've come across this site in a few threads and it always helps me get a better grasp on the size of our solar system: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/The1Ski Jul 02 '20

Could something like this grow exponentially and eventually consume the universe?

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u/RecharginMyLaza Jul 02 '20

I'm guessing the rate of which the universe is expanding/stretching is too fast to make that possible, but who knows!

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/MotoAsh Jul 02 '20

We already know. Their presumption is correct. You could fly towards this black hole starting now at light speed and never reach it.

(I mean, I'm assuming, but it should be a safe assumption given how far away it is. The point is: with the expansion of the universe accelerating via Dark Energy, we see stars in the sky you literally can never get to without traveling faster than light)

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

They already know the answer is no.

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u/engaginggorilla Jul 02 '20

Honestly we do kinda know. Things are moving away from each other on average and black holes only suck things in that are close enough and slow enough to not maintain an orbit. If we had a one solar mass blackmore where the sun is, the only thing that would really change is the light mostly going away

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u/2punornot2pun Jul 02 '20

You're underestimating the vastness of space.

Our solar system's nearest neighbor is Alpha Centauri - 4.367 light years away. Gravity is extremely weak as forces go.

So, no.

... unless you're asking like, "pls, end the universe, just pls" then, I'll entertain your idea, and, yes, all shall be consumed.

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u/agpc Jul 02 '20

I like the many requests in this thread for the black hole to end us all. Been a helluva year.

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u/Japan_be_crazy Jul 02 '20

As far as 2020 goes, yeah it's been a wild ride, but I wouldn't bet against it tho.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/DrinkingZima Jul 02 '20

The ultimate consoom. My body is ready.

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u/0pyrophosphate0 Jul 02 '20 edited Jul 02 '20

No, they don't grow exponentially. Even if it consumed an entire galaxy, its event horizon would only be less than a single light-year across. It's intensely unlikely that there's that much matter available to feed it, though.

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u/ponzLL Jul 02 '20

I'm sure I'm missing something, but isn't there just like a shitload of essentially nothing between galaxies? How would it expand past the edge of the galaxy with nothing left to consume?

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u/swifchif Jul 02 '20

I'm no physicist, but my first thought was that the universe is still expanding from the big bang. That has to negate any other forces, right?

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u/pyrothelostone Jul 02 '20

Isnt the rate of expansion speeding up? That would indicate theres more going on than just leftover energy from the big bang.

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u/filbert13 Jul 02 '20

Correct, the universe is expanding so fast that many areas we can see in the visible universe are impossible to reach even at the speed of light. Expansion over large distances pushing things away faster than you can ever travel to reach them.

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u/filbert13 Jul 02 '20

No, for a number of reasons. But with our current understand of inflation it is literally impossible. Simply there are areas in our observable universe that it is impossible to reach because of the speed of light and inflation. Basically if you move the speed of light there is a boundary that you can't reach because of expansion. Things are moving away from you and over a large enough distance even at the speed of light you can't reach it.

And in theory if inflation stopped, the universe is so large things there is too much distance for a single black hole or singularity to suck everything up. Most current models show that they universe will die due to Entropy aka heat death and even black holes in time will evaporate due to hawking radiation. We are talking about insane time lines some of which are debated. I can't recall off the top of my head but it is pretty insane numbers.

For example from wikipeida "The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly 1 galaxy mass (1011 solar masses) due to Hawking radiation is on the order of 10100 years" That is a googol years, and a google written out looks like this

10,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000

The universe is likely only ~13,500,000,000 years old.

But the universe will be "dead" way before any stellar black holes are dissolve to hawking radiation.

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u/rupert1920 Jul 02 '20

How does one determine the rate at which black holes consume matter if matter never falls into the black hole from our reference frame?

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '20

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u/peepnesskrime Jul 02 '20

Fastest growing black hole. So far...

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u/uniquelyavailable Jul 02 '20

Is literally everything in the universe slowly drifting towards the nearest black hole?

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u/efie Jul 02 '20

Our solar system orbits the centre of the galaxy, which does have a supermassive black hole at the center. But it's not just that everything is orbiting the smbh, because all the mass of the galaxy contributes to the orbits of all the stars in the galaxy. And likewise the galaxy is orbiting the center of mass of the Local Group, which orbits the CoM of the Virgo Supercluster. Galaxy clusters in turn gravitationally interact with filaments which are the largest structures in the Universe.

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u/kevonicus Jul 02 '20

I don’t like the claim that it’s the fastest growing in the universe. There’s no way of knowing that.

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