It blows my mind to think about sub-stellar mass black holes can exist. As I was ignorant of their theoretical possibility, I thought the lower bound limit to a blackholes mass was the Chandrasekhar limit [1] (or even greater as that simply is the boundary between white dwarves and further collapse to either a neutron star or black hole).
To learn that the conditions of the early universe could have create sub-stellar mass black holes means there could be tons of small black holes out there lurking in interstellar space.
What would happen if one of them got close enough to our Sun to begin accreting gas from the Sun?
- Could it eat the entire Sun and cause our solar system to go dark?
- As it gained sufficient mass from the Sun, it would switch from orbiting the Sun to them being a binary system. Would that destabilize the orbits of planets?
- Or disturb a ton of Oort cloud bodies and potentially cause tons of comets and raise the risk of impact events?
- At what point would the Sun's fusion stop?
- Obviously this depends on the binary dance of the 2 bodies, but rapidly the sun would be pulled apart.
- Would there be X-rays and particle jets like a micro-version of a quasar?
I really hope someone is modeling this!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit
To learn that the conditions of the early universe could have create sub-stellar mass black holes means there could be tons of small black holes out there lurking in interstellar space.
What would happen if one of them got close enough to our Sun to begin accreting gas from the Sun?
- Could it eat the entire Sun and cause our solar system to go dark?
- As it gained sufficient mass from the Sun, it would switch from orbiting the Sun to them being a binary system. Would that destabilize the orbits of planets?
- Or disturb a ton of Oort cloud bodies and potentially cause tons of comets and raise the risk of impact events?
- At what point would the Sun's fusion stop?
- Obviously this depends on the binary dance of the 2 bodies, but rapidly the sun would be pulled apart.
- Would there be X-rays and particle jets like a micro-version of a quasar?
I really hope someone is modeling this!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit