Do black holes ever stop eating?
Answers
Answer:
Astronomer Skyler Sutton would like you to know that black holes don’t suck. “They’re not cosmic vacuum cleaners going around and sucking everything in,” he says. “They just use gravity the same way everything else does.”
Birth
A stellar-mass black hole starts its life with a death. It’s born when a star at least 10 times more massive than our Sun runs out of fuel, having already fused hydrogen into helium, and helium into other elements, from carbon and oxygen all the way up to iron deep in the star’s core. With a weighty metal heart it has nothing left to bind together. It’s reached the end of its lifespan, and it explodes, sending the outer layers out in a violent burst as the core collapses in on itself.
“If there’s enough mass there—three times the mass of the Sun in the center of the star—this will collapse into a black hole. We call those stellar mass black holes because they have a mass similar to a star,” says Skyler, an astronomer at Georgia State University.
“It's actually really common to find dead stars where the new stars are forming, because the most massive ones don’t live very long. They’re gone right away,” Skyler says. “The lifetime of a star depends on its mass. The most massive stars live much shorter lives because they just burn through their fuel very quickly.
In what Skyler calls a ‘giant recycling program,’ the creation of black holes can actually spark the formation of new stars as well. When a group of new stars form, the most massive among them die out very quickly, exploding at the end of their short lives. “Those shock waves compress more gas and dust to cause more stars to start forming. Then the most massive of those will live short lives and explode, which will send out new shock waves and start forming more stars. It's this chain reaction of the deaths of stars causing the births of brand new stars,” Skyler says.
But stellar-mass black holes are only a small part of the picture. Much weirder are super massive black holes, giant beasts whose origins are far more obscure. They’ve been observed at the center of galaxies, including our own, and seem to have a slightly different way of forming than their smaller compatriots.
“A super massive black hole as we see it now has a mass of a million or a billion times the mass of the Sun. But it didn’t start that way, it started smaller. So the question is, how did they form and how did they get that big?” Jillian Bell ovary, a theoretical astrophysicist at Queens borough Community College says.
Astronomers know that super massive black holes got really big, very fast, showing up around 13 billion years ago. At that point, Bell ovary says, “we already see that there are black holes that have billion times the mass of the Sun. We know they existed really early in the universe, and that's weird because there is all this mass in a very small space, and we want to know how it got there.”
“It's a bit of a chicken or the egg kind of problem,” Skyler says. “In the very early universe it's possible we formed black holes just from direct collapse of really over-dense regions. Maybe the material started collapsing gravitation ally, and then kept collapsing all the way down into a black hole and didn’t actually form stars or anything.”
The other option is that maybe super massive black holes got their start in early galaxies, as smaller black holes formed and coalesced in the center of infant galaxies.
The precursors to these early super massive black holes were likely moderately sized to start with, says Bell ovary, and would have had to be larger than a mere stellar mass black hole, which wouldn’t have been able to grow fast enough in such a short period of time to form the behemoths of the early universe that we’ve observed.
“The super massive black hole has to get some sort of jump start, it can’t be too small when it forms because then it won’t have enough time to get huge. So it has to be medium-sized when it forms.” Bell ovary says.
Researchers are still trying to figure out how those first black holes would have formed from the hot gas and dust of the early universe. Typically, when matter like that collapses together, it forms stars. So there may have been something different about the chemistry of the early universe that helped kindle those initial black holes.
“That gas in the early universe was probably only made of hydrogen and helium, because those were the only elements made in the Big Bang, and everything else was made inside of stars. If you don’t have stars yet, you can’t have any other elements yet,” Bell ovary says. The chemistry of the early universe, as well as the motion, or lack of motion of the gas could have helped trigger black hole formation in those early eons.
Hope this helped you out
he he Out of this world isn't it.
So yes they do