Massive stars capable of creating black holes go through several periods of collapse and expansion.
Physics professor and black hole expert at the University of Sussex in the UK, Xavier Calmette, described the phases of the death of the Sun and made a prediction for the transformation of a star into a black hole.
About it it says in a publication on LiveScience.
Phases of the death of the Sun
According to the scientist’s forecast, in about 5 billion years the Sun will burn out all its fuel and will no longer be able to resist its own gravity. This will cause the outer layers of the star to fly apart and its core to shrink to an incredibly dense state.
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About a billion years after its core runs out of hydrogen, the Sun will enter its red giant phase—expanding into the orbit of Mars, engulfing the inner planets, including Earth.
The red giant’s outer layers will then cool and dissipate, forming a planetary nebula around its smoldering core.
The final stage of the death of the star will be its transformation into a white dwarf, the size of which will be approximately the same as the size of the Earth. Now the diameter of the Sun is 109 times larger than our planet.
Will the sun become a black hole?
Stars that are capable of becoming black holes go through almost the same phases of death as the Sun. But such a transformation is influenced by several conditions, among which the most important is the correct mass.
“It’s very simple: the Sun is not heavy enough to become a black hole,” explained Xavier Calmette. “Stars with an initial mass that is about 20-25 times the mass of our Sun have the potential to experience the gravitational collapse necessary for the formation of black holes.”
This threshold, known as the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkow limit, was first calculated by Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues.
How a black hole is formed
The scientist described the process that precedes the formation of a black hole: when a star runs out of fuel in its core, nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium still occurs in its outer layers, then the core collapses, the outer layers expand, and it enters the red giant phase.
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Massive stars capable of creating black holes go through several such periods of collapse and expansion, losing more mass each time.
As the physicist explained, this happens because at high pressures and temperatures, stars can fuse heavier elements. So the process continues until the star’s core is made entirely of iron, the heaviest element a star can create.
The collapsed star then explodes as a supernova, throwing even more of its mass into space. Then it turns into a black hole and begins to feed on nearby gas and dust.
The sun will never reach the stage of melting iron and will not experience such a transformation.
Let us recall that a study by scientists previously showed that the Sun expects many changes that will occur much earlier, foreshadowing the end of the solar system.
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