Does a black hole eat the sun from the inside? | Urania

This is a classic story of apocalyptic fiction. The Sun, our invaluable source of heat and light, collapses into a black hole. Or a stray black hole appears in the sky and swallows them up. The end is near! Children involved in astronomical events are usually very interested in this dark subject.

Meanwhile, our Sun will never become a black hole. It simply has too little mass to it. For the same reason, it will not explode as a supernova. We also know nothing about an ordinary black hole on a collision course with the Sun or Earth. However, if a stellar-mass black hole swallowed the Sun in the indefinite future, we would know about it in about eight minutes, because that’s how long it takes light from the Sun to reach us.

Now suppose that something else had happened, and that our star had one day been sucked into a small, primitive black hole. This is where things get interesting. A new post on the arXiv preprint server is also dedicated to this issue.

Primordial black holes are hypothetical black holes that are believed to have formed in the first moments of the universe. Unlike stellar-mass black holes or supermassive black holes found at the centers of large galaxies, primordial black holes will generally be small, about the mass of an asteroid and the size of a sphere. They appear in some theoretical models and have already been used to try to explain many phenomena, from dark matter to the distant hypothetical planet X. Many of these models assume that primordial black holes are common, so it is inevitable that some stars will eventually disappear. Become one of them. You will intercept them. These theoretical stars that contain a black hole at their center are known as Hawking stars.

According to new work, a captured primordial black hole would have almost no effect on a Sun-like star. Compared to the mass of the Sun, the mass of an asteroid resembles a speck of dust. Even if the spot were a black hole, it would not be able to absorb a large portion of the Sun quickly. But over time, its presence will affect many things. A black hole in a star will consume the material in the star’s core and grow over time. If it was able to grow so quickly at the cosmic level, it could even swallow a star whole. If not, it could still strongly affect his development and the end of his life.

Research shows that it is largely due to the initial size of the primordial black hole. For those with more mass, about a billion times the mass of the Sun, they could devour the star in less than half a billion years. If this is really happening in the universe, there should also be black holes with a mass of about the mass of the Sun, which are too small to form from supernovae, just like conventional stellar-mass black holes. Will we see them someday?

If the primordial black hole was much smaller, say less than a trillion solar masses, things get more complicated. A small black hole would consume some of the material inside the star, but not at a rapid rate. However, it would cause confusion in its core, heating it up more than nuclear fusion itself. As a result, the star could evolve into a so-called red extreme star, which would be cooler and redder than regular red giants. All this turbulence in the core can also affect the star’s surface activity. The effects may be subtle, but the authors of this paper suggest that the presence of a primordial black hole in the star could be detected using stellar seismology.

At the same time, we assure you: based on the already conducted solar seismic research, it can be concluded that there is almost certainly no black hole in our Sun. Even if it were, it would have to be very small, so there is no doubt that cosmic devastation is imminent, at least from this side of space.

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Source: phys.org

Prepared by: Elizabieta Kolegoska

Sun Image: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain