Black holes form when massive stars die. Does this fate await the sun on earth, or is our star doomed to be just a dim corpse? Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
SPACE — In about 5 billion years, the sun will reach the end of its nuclear fuel life and will no longer be able to support itself against its own gravity. The outer layers of our star would have dispersed, in the process crushing the Earth, while the core would have collapsed to become extremely dense, leaving behind stellar remnants.
Ordinarily, when the gravitational collapse of a star’s core is complete, what remains of the star will become a black hole, a region of time and space with gravitational influence so great that not even light can escape its clutches.
So, will the sun become a black hole when it dies?
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The short answer is no. Because, the sun does not have the ability to become a black hole. “It’s simple: The sun is not heavy enough to become a black hole,” Xavier Calmet, a black hole expert and professor of physics at the University of Sussex, England, told Live Science.
Several conditions influence whether a star can become a black hole, including its composition, rotation, and the processes that govern its evolution. “However, the main requirement is the right amount of mass,” says Calmet.
Calmet said stars with an initial mass greater than 20 to 25 times the mass of our Sun have the potential to experience the gravitational collapse needed to form black holes. This threshold, known as the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, was first calculated by J Robert Oppenheimer and colleagues.
Currently, scientists think that a dying star must leave a stellar core that is about two to three times the mass of the Sun to create a black hole. So, theoretically, if the sun’s mass were twice its current mass, it would potentially become a black hole, right? Wrong.
When a star runs out of nuclear fuel in its core, nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium still occurs in its outer layers. So, as the star’s core collapses, its outer layers expand and enter what is known as the red giant phase.
When the sun becomes a red giant in about 6 billion years, a billion years after it runs out of hydrogen in its core, it will expand around the orbit of Mars, swallowing up the inner planets, including Earth. The outer layers of a red giant will cool over time and spread to form a planetary nebula around the sun’s fiery core.
The massive star that created the black hole went through several periods of collapse and expansion, losing more and more mass each time. This is because at high pressures and temperatures, stars can fuse heavier elements. This continues until the star’s core is made of iron, the heaviest element a star can produce, and the star explodes in a supernova, losing even more mass.
According to NASA, a typical stellar-mass black hole (the smallest variation astronomers have ever observed) is three to 10 times heavier than the Sun. Others can reach 100 times the size of the sun. Hefty stellar-mass black holes didn’t start out this way above. It becomes heavier as it feeds on nearby gas and dust, and even on the body of its companion star if it was once part of a binary system (twin star).
However, the sun will never reach the iron-smelting stage. “Instead, the Sun will become a white dwarf, a dense star about the size of Earth,” said Calmet. So, the Earth will never know the sensation and terror of being swallowed by a black hole, unless the entire universe is already inside a black hole. Source: LiveScience
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2023-09-05 16:18:45
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