The Biggest Possible Black Hole - Sixty Symbols
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.พ. 2025
- Dr Becky Smethurst discusses Ultra Massive Black Holes - more information and book links below ↓ ↓ ↓
A Brief History of Black Holes by Becky Smethurst (Amazon links)...
US: amzn.to/3u0b4BN
UK: amzn.to/3VxlNPV
Becky's website: rebeccasmethur...
And her TH-cam channel: / drbecky
How Big Can a Black Hole Grow? by Andrew King: arxiv.org/abs/...
Visit our website at www.sixtysymbol...
We're on Facebook at / sixtysymbols
And Twitter at / sixtysymbols
This project features scientists from The University of Nottingham
bit.ly/NottsPhy...
Patreon: / sixtysymbols
Sixty Symbols videos by Brady Haran
www.bradyharanb...
Email list: eepurl.com/YdjL9
A Brief History of Black Holes by Becky Smethurst... (Amazon links)... US: amzn.to/3u0b4BN and UK: amzn.to/3VxlNPV
You should pin your comment📌so it stays at the top.
My copy is on order...
Can one get it from anywhere else than Amazon? From EU preferably.
Purchased 👍🏾
Don't have the free funds to purchase it myself, but I definitely suggested my local library do so.
I feel like Dr Becky's ability to freehand draw a black hole and accretion disk is more impressive than I realise.
I too was impressed.
@@sixtysymbols I appreciate that you ask folks to draw things so often. Math and Science need more drawings! Even when it's just a drawing of a mouse.
@@QirnsChannel WORST - MOUSE - EVER!! x'D
Anything for the merch
10:58 for your viewing pleasure.
Thanks Brady for keeping this channel alive for so many years! I love your videos and dr Becky!
Dr Becky is back on sixty symbols!
I am in love with Becky's enthusiasm and I will absolutely be getting the book!
Nice work - hope you enjoy it!
Forget the book- I'm in love with Dr Becky.
@@writingfriction welcome to the club mate
@@writingfriction get in line
@@writingfriction You're all too late, sorry 😏
I’ve worked so hard to be featured on this channel. It’s about time!
Nothing escapes you!
this vid makes me happy on so many levels
A black hole expert discussing the subject of their latest book with a renowned science documentary maker, or from a regular's perspective - Becky and Brody having a wholesome catch up :)
inspiring to see how a simple idea over ten years ago of doing vids of professors talking about symbols has had so many positive knock on effects for the people involved with it.
Thanks for the self-gravitational radius info! Looks like I'll be running some new black hole simulations soon.
Glad to finally see a video about TON 618! I imaged this with my astrophotography rig/observatory a few years ago, as there aren't many full, true color images of this quasar, especially taken by amateurs/citizen scientists like myself. I wish I had a spectrometer to measure the red/blue shift of objects like this, perhaps one day I will be able to buy or build one. Clear Skies!
Phoenix a is bigger
Dr. Becky's book is amazing. I got the audiobook, so hours of hearing her talk to you. It's great!
I'll add to Dr Becky's thank-you by also thanking you for bringing us *all* the other wonderful
scientists from U Nott to youtube! You, sir *are* a gentleman *and* a scholar!
I love all Brady's video channels and I use to love watching Becky on Sixty Symbols before she started her own channel. I was hoping she would do that because I would go out of my way to watch her appearances. Anyway, glad to see her back doing a cameo on this channel again and that dedication in her book to Brady I thought was just beautiful.
I see Dr. Becky, I click. Only after starting the video did I realise that this isn't her channel.
Love Dr. Becky and her enthusiasm
Thank you Brady for giving Dr Becky her start on TH-cam, from all of us..
This is easily one of the best science videos I've ever seen on TH-cam. Dr. Smethurst you are awesome.
Great interview! Thank you, Dr. Becky.
Sixty Symbols is where I first saw Dr. Becky a long time ago.
I was so confused to hear Brady's voice at the start. I though this was a Dr. Becky video when I clicked on it! Love you both!
Genuinely disappointed that it wasn't called the Disc (of) Innermost Stable Circular Orbits.
Disco.
Awesome, I just looked at saw that my audio book provider have Beckys book. I've been looking for something to listen to for a while now!
I wish they explained why the self gravitational radius doesn’t grow or doesn’t grow as fast as the isco.
The SGO depends in part on the 'gravity gradient' across an object, the tidal forces. Just as Jupiter prevented a planet forming between it and Mars, a black hole can stop 'clumping' of its disk. While the ISCO grows directly with the hole's mass (Twice as heavy, twice as large, relating directly to the strength of gravity at a distance from the hole) the SGO for an object of a certain size rises with the mass of the hole to the 1/3 power. (Relying on the DIFFERENCE between the strength of gravity at either side of the object.) One is just more directly related to the hole's mass and gravity.
"Thanks for giving me my start on youtube."
That's so sweet. And true. Thanks Sixty Symbols for introducing us to such bright minds.
I asked this very question on a Dr. Becky video a while back. I'm so glad to get an answer!
what people often dont realize is that you couldnt even look at a black hole if you're anywhere near it because the accretion disc is brighter than any star could ever be since the heat production from THAT gravitational pull outscales the energy output of any kind of fusion process
WOW!
Well ton 618 in particular.
It outshines every star in the milky way combined many times over.
Its 160 trillion times brighter than the sun.
Sounds like the ultimate boss fight for redheads.
@Josh Smith that is not true.
Black holes have been demonstrated in multiple ways.
Includeing 2 direct imagines.
The part that is almost certainly not real is a singularity since those are infinitely dense and a quirk of the math.
Many if not most physicists believe that singularities will disappear once we have a theory of quantum gravity.
Also you used theory wrong. In a scientific context theories are proven and well substantiated.
Hypothesis is what you wanted.
@Josh Smith That's not true at all, there is overwhelming scientific evidence for black holes. They recently made a picture of two of them and prior to that they had stars orbiting what seemed to be 'nothing'. They have data of the gravitational waves of two black holes merging.
Great Video. Bonus Dr. Becky!
Always awesome to hear about black holes. Thanks for the amazing video!
Probably the best video I have seen from Dr. Becky.
yaaaaay Becky on one of Brady's videos! Two of my favorite TH-camrs!
Heyyyy. This is a very fascinating topic. Thank you for covering this!
By the way, we actually found a much bigger black hole. It is the black hole of Phoenix A, the central galaxy of the Phoenix Cluster. It is presumed to have 100 billion solar masses, vs. TON 618's 66 billion. It was inferred based on the properties of the galaxy Phoenix A (its Sérsic profile, a very complicated topic).
But what excites me the most is that the James Webb Space Telescope, our favorite space telescope, is scheduled to observe the Phoenix Cluster and the galaxy Phoenix A specifically by July 29-31, 2023.
They will not go for the black hole specifically, but they will try to uncover the mystery of the Phoenix Cluster's cooling flow. This is actually a very mysterious topic that we only knew of recently, and the Phoenix Cluster is the quintessential case. Its cooling flow is the strongest we ever observed.
A brief summary: cooling flow is when the gases in the very center of the galaxy cluster cools very rapidly, and since cold gas collapses and has no radiation, the outlying gas surrounding the cluster, which is hotter, will come crashing down and "flow" towards the cooler gas at the center.
We actually knew very little of why this happens, but it is presumed that the central black hole has got something to do with it. Black holes produce a lot of radiation through their accretion disks, thereby heating the gas around them. So I presume it would be obligatory for JWST to take a closer look at Phoenix A's monster black hole.
And more importantly, it may help us understand galaxy clusters and how they work, since cooling flow is considered a feature of a short but very significant phase of a galaxy cluster's evolutionary stage.
This video was awesome, but thanks for the book plug as well, I didn't know about it.
Nice to see you back on sixty symbols… for a minute I thought YT dumped an old video in my feed.
Dr Becky and Dr Brady, a collab of such joy.
Yaaay Beckyyy ! One of the greatest physics doctor on TH-cam (like Dr. Don Lincoln from Fermilab both are amazing imo)
We all love Becky! ❤
DR Becky is so awesome!
ordered your hardcover book by Amazon. It is not available in the states at Barnes and Noble (a week ago). Can't wait to read it!
Just got your book on audible😁
She is just so cheerfull and passionate about her field :)
I liked that video a lot. A nice conversation with Becky. Please think about doing more.
Very interesting, thank you for making a video on this subject.
Oh, wow, I hadn't heard of this new book. Thumbs up for the video so that I can now go get my Kindle version!
Hey friends I'm new here but wow I'm impressed... This channel seems a bit like Numberphile but with physics instead of maths. 💯💜
Funny I find this video today. I was just reading the chapter about ultramassive black holes last night!
Once again Becky. Great video. Absolutely fascinating.
I’m curious if hawking radiation would eventually cause these max-sized black holes to shrink small enough to begin accreting again. If so, does that mean the black holes would all hover around that max size, growing to it but no further, and not shrinking much smaller because they’d grow up again
hawking radiation is very, VERY week, it would take a unimaginable amount of time for a blackhole to noticeably shrink through this process. it would probably grow more through eating rogue material flying at it than it would lose mass through hawking radiation. I would hazard to argue that light, neutrinos and other high energy particle hitting the blackhole from all directions would give it more mass than it would lose, but that is just speculation from my part.
I could be wrong but by the time hawking radiation is a problem, matter and inturn accretion won't be. The time scales are ridiculous. Can someone let me know if my thinking is wrong?
@@jackhand4073 Hawking radiation takes on the order of a googol years to evaporate a big black hole. It could be the slowest process in the universe.
@YeYaTeTeTe Very interesting! Thanks for the calculations - mind boggling time scales indeed!
The rate that Hawking radiation loses energy ("temperature" so to speak) is _inversely_ proportional to mass*
Meaning more massive black holes will lose mass _slower_ . In addition to having more mass to lose. In fact, cubically so (how long it takes to fully evaporate is proportional to the mass cubed)
* for black holes at least, but this effect
is a property of event horizons in general. See Unruh effect for another event horizon caused by acceleration of a reference frame.
The thinking mans crumpet ..........thought I`d drag it down to my level 😆
There are two statements in this video that didn't feel right and when I looked them up seem to be way off.
Anyone know if I am just not seeing the data right or if it was just misspoken?
"Bigger than the mass over everything in the entire milky way..." Ton: 66b solar mass; Milky Way: ~1.2t solar mass. Wiki says bigger than the mass of the *stars* of the milky way so I can see that difference and where the confusion may be.
"crushed down into a space smaller than the solar system" Again Ton 618: 390b km; Solar System: 26b km (Heliopause)
So it looks like Ton 618 is bigger than the solar system even at the most generous size.
I couldn't find a definition that makes this work.
90% of that mass is dark matter. Which may or may not exist
Yes. The statement is one of those factoids that gets repeated a lot because it sounds impressive and simple. In truth TON 618 is about as massive as all the stars of the milky way, compressed into an object with a volume less than the Kuiper Belt. It's roughly true but falls apart on analysis.
Great stuff. Note that black holes too massive for accretion disks are large enough to intercept vast amounts of radiation, whether light or otherwise, so they will keep growing even if they don't swallow bulk matter.
Yep they finally large enough to hit a lot of stuff. Smaller black holes fairly tiny targets.
It was difficult to understand, that's due to my simple brain. I need to buy the book to understand more, thank you for explaining. 🙏🏼
Really really interesting video. Thank you!
How can you not love Dr. Becky?
??
Man, just in time for the Christmas gift season too!
Takes me back! I used to sign my photo students' yearbooks with a drawing of a camera!
love this channel
Dr. Becky is the best.
Dr. Smethurst is awesome!
another example of the explanation that is waaay more interesting that the answer itself
Becky is my favorite place to get deep space picture news
I didn't understand why the Innermost Stable Circular Orbit being the same size or larger than the Self Gravitational Radius would stop accretion. I assume the latter is basically an interpretation of the Roche limit and the typical sizes of stars? It sounded like a star would disintegrate when approaching a black hole, but its material could still orbit the black hole in a stable way, somewhat further in. If the ISCO was larger than the SGR, wouldn't that just mean that stars are doomed to fall in before they are torn apart?
From what I understood if the ISCO is larger than the SGR then the only thing you can have orbiting the black hole is "clumps" which are probably mostly stars. That means that you can't have the accretion disc because all the stuff orbiting would always start clumping together.
I had the same question.
IIUC, in a "normal" black hole friction within the accretion disk is responsible for sapping the orbital energy of accreting particles until they hit the ISCO and spiral in. If the theoretical outer boundary of the accretion disk is inside the ISCO, the black hole has no mechanism for reducing the orbits of objects that might otherwise join its accretion disk, and highly elliptical/hyperbolic orbits may even skim within the ISCO without being trapped since they have a lot of excess energy?
So you're left with the only ways for an object to enter the black hole being the sort of "bulls-eye" Dr. Becky mentioned, where I guess you'd need a closest approach somewhere between the event horizon and the ISCO depending on the orbital energy of the object, and objects that independently place themselves in circular orbits at or within the ISCO, which don't occur in nature AFAIK.
Intuitively it feels like a black hole that massive wouldn't *need* an accretion disk to pull in matter-it could just sweep through space like a giant eraser-but the effect this video's talking about may come down to the fact that a hypermassive black hole doesn't have a proportionally hypermassive accretion disk to pull in matter, so its growth is slowed to what's effectively a stop *relative to its size*.
All speculation. :)
If the ISCO is too large then clumps of matter (Stars, clusters...) will be stable. At that point 'friction' between clumps becomes negligible, in the way that it's very rare for two stars in our galaxy to interact. Compared with an accretion disk where its glow is a direct energy loss, this drastically cuts down the amount of material falling to the center in the same way our sun is not swallowing planets on a regular basis.
The thing to keep in mind is that all that mass is concentrated in a point in the center, an infinitely small point. I think we intiuitively mistake the event horizon circle as having the mass evenly spread which is not the case. This is why we get these three other outer circles, EH, ISCO and SGR.
@@jip5889 That's what I was missing. Thanks.
another thing about black hole size, is there a size distribution? where most supermassive black holes should have radius R, some larger but many smaller, things like that?
That drawing. very cool
I really like Dr Becky, she should make her own youtube channel!!
Love Dr. Becky.
She's burning up astronomy. ❤🔥❤🔥❤🔥❤🔥❤🔥
So you are telling me that I can have becky read me a bedtime story about blackholes? Sounds like a win win.
I think the most distant jswt photos show galaxies not all merged or grouping enough to explain the observations that early in the big bang. Like they aren't merging which others enough to explain size today
Fascinating!
It's an excellent book, I certainly recommend it.
Very confusing and fascinating
This is like a avengers movie❤❤❤ I love and learn a lot from Dr Becky’s content😎😎
Why does the selfgravitational radius not grow with the mass of the black hole/with the size of its eventhorizon?
When you ask "Is there an upper limit to the mass of a black hole" you go on to answer the question assuming a NATURAL black hole. But what if some hyper-advanced civilization decided to park a sphere of unimaginable mass outside the accretion disk and then launch all of it, all at once, at the speed of light, into the black hole? Surely that would increase the mass higher than the "limit" you describe? I think it's important to distinguish between physical limits and stochastic limits.
Office hours with Dr. Becky!
Can’t wait to receive my copy. Amazon is taking forever
Is there a theoretical maximum size for a star? If there is what is it, and what would be its radius?
Or from the Holographic Principle Imagery POV, Spacetime is the orthogonal-normal distribution of Black hole Singularity-point positioning by Sublimation-Tunnelling, mathematically speaking in Susskind's version of ER=EPR information In-form-ation.
0:10 Woah! What are these totally obscure pop culture references?
Finally Sixty Symbols is complete again!
the self-gravatational radius is a constant for black holes? it's not proportional to the mass of a black hole?
Funny thing is the black hole isn’t that dense, if you measure from the event horizon
P = M/V
M = 60 billion solar masses = 1.2E41 KG
S-Radius = 1.7E14 m (assuming no spin)
V = 4/3 pi r^3 = 2E43 m^3
P = 1.21E41/2E43 = 0.006 kg/m^3
For comparison, air is about a kilogram per cubic meter, so a ball of consistent plasma 0.2LY in radius would just collapse into a black hole. That’s because the swartzchild radius increases in direct proportion to the mass beneath it, but mass increases as the cube of the radius. IIRC scientists consider us very lucky that the universe only has an average density of 4.9 protons per cubic meter. Too much bigger and the whole thing would collapse into a black hole!
Don’t worry though. That may not sound very dense, but remember that is literally the entire galaxy crammed into our solar system. Most of that mass would be the consistent low density plasma of stars!
Gotta love how astrophysicists say most matter is dark matter, then completely ignore its existence when talking about things like black hole growth.
That was interesting, I had not thought about black holes having a maximum size.
I thought they just grew and grew until they ate everything nearby. It's really surprising to hear they may have a maximum size.
@@Kevin_Street it is understandable. The bigger it is, the weaker the surface gravity. At a certain point it's almost nothing
I doubt there I'd an actual limit
@@nosuchthing8 is that based on something other than your tummy feelings?
When particles fall into a black hole, do they at the highest velocity approach or get at or exceed the speed of light in vaccum?
Couldn't we detect the black hole by its effect on other nerby stars? Even though the black hole reached the maximum size above which there is no disk of stuff, still the hole has some mass and is affecting the path of the stars that pass by or orbit it?
Is there an upper limit to how large they can get through mergers? Or do the same principles apply to entire black holes as to other accreting material?
Yes, the expansion of the universe prevents everything being gravitationally bound, once all the mass of a galaxy cluster collapses into a black hole there'd be nothing left for it to consume. The limit there is perhaps 10x that of accretion.
Actually, black holes orbiting each other and eventually merging really do follow different rules. The gas in the accretion disk is losing energy (and thus it's orbit is decaying) through collisions. Two black holes orbiting aren't colliding with anything, but their orbits still decay. They are actually losing energy through gravitational waves, and it can be a *substantial* amount of energy. Like, several solar masses worth.* But that means that as long as they can get close enough to orbit, they can merge, regardless of size. So the only limit is the expansion of the universe pushing things so far apart that they'll never encounter another black hole.
*See R. Abbott et al., "GW190521: A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of 150 M⊙" for an instance of an 85 M⊙ black hole and 66M⊙ black hole merging to produce a 142M⊙ black hole. But 85+66=151. So they collectively lost 9M⊙ worth of energy as gravitational waves. Super cool stuff.
It’s so weird, black holes give me this existential fear like nothing else
I feel the same way!
I view it as, we know of our own mortality as humans. But in a much larger scale, black holes are the inevitable ‘death’ of most matter in the universe. Learning about black holes, my atoms are vibrating with anxiety!
The whole universe gives me the heebee-jeebees.
??
Why would the ISCO being outside the other thing be an issue? Couldn’t collisions still cause energy loss, even if they stick together, and fall closer than the ISCO?
WAIT WHAT?
Once black holes get too big we won't be able to detect them anymore? That's just awesomely weird.
Couple questions;
1. Wouldn't these ultra massive black holes still be able to eat via things orbiting them giving off energy via gravitational waves and loosing orbital energy?
2. Is the inner most stable orbit an exact circle? If there was structure inside a black hole (big if) could we learn about this structure by studying the shape of the inner most stable orbit?
3. You say things colliding with this black hole would be rare. Yes space is big, but my calculations have the radius of a 50,000,000,000 solar mass black hole as being about 1000 AU (1.5% of a light year). That seems to be getting into the size that stuff would be bull's eyeing it all the time. Perhaps not a solar mass of stuff, but over time I would think this would still appreciably increase its mass. Am I wrong here?
4. Why didn't you draw the black hole top down? LOL
Fun Fact; a black hole this big would take about 1.5 x 10^99 years to decay via hawking radiation, however, currently it would not even emit as much heat as it would gain from the cosmic microwave background radiation. Given the expansion of the universe, this black hole will be one of the last objects in the universe.
1.) Yes, as well as orbital rearrangements. But this is a VERY slow process compared with accretion and would not appreciably add to the hole's mass in the next 100 billion years.
2.) The ISCO is a spherical region where any disruption causes an object to fall into the hole. If the hole is spinning or not itself perfectly spherical, this region grows larger than expected. So measuring it WILL tell us something3.) about the hole.
3.) Not really. The space around these holes is not random, most objects will be orbiting the hole itself, where the physics tends to prevent them hitting it. It is not just a matter of drawing straight lines through a galaxy and seeing how many cross the hole, objects will be actively positioned and moving to avoid collision. It is remarkably hard to hit a central mass.
Isnt the Phoenix Cluster SMBH estimated at one 100 billion solar masses?
Doesn't Hawking radiation cause black holes evaporate faster as they grow bigger?
Edit: My mistake, they evaporate slower as they grow.
Theoretically the uppermost limit no matter the conjectures would be to take total energy/mass of universe translate it into mass then work out the size from there via gravity equations and geometry
how do we understand that bh is spinning since there is no information coming out?
Is Phoenix A at the centre of the Phoenix Cluster bigger then TON 618?
I love watching someone who's so passionate about the science, excitedly sharing and explaining in layterms what is going on.
Questions: 1. I don't get how the ISCO isn't completely subjective for literally every instance of matter in the accretion disc, unless maybe everything within the disk is atomized to be exactly the same uniform individual particle mass relative to each other, depending on its location within a scalar field where individual particle masses are higher and higher the further you orbit from the event horizon? (maybe I answered my own question there, but I'm not positive). -but then similarly, why wouldn't the Self Gravitational Radius just grow infinitely, assuming the black hole was feeding and had a hypothetically infinite source of matter incrementally surrounding it? I understand that's not how matter distributes in the universe, but I just feel like as a thought experiment the SGR would more understandably be subjective for any nearby object according to the mass of said object in relation to the mass of the black hole and distance from event horizon or any matter in the accretion disk. Even if some stars formed outside of the accretion disk, how can the changing mass of the disk or the growing mass of the black hole not eventually influence this group of stars to form/become part of the evolving disk, ad infinitum?
2. Couldn't Hawking Radiation theoretically "whittle down" a black hole that has reached the relative equilibrium of ISCO and SGR, and therefore the decreasing mass of the black hole would eventually pull back the ISCO to the point where any nearby matter could then be more gravitationally attracted to the black hole than to something else, thus restarting "feeding" and reigniting the accretion disk?
3. Dr. Becky can I maybe buy you a coffee some time?
A ultra large black hole simply doesnt have an accretion disk.
When a smaller black hole comes close to a star it tears it apart and all the friction between particles causes the material to accumulate around the black hole. A ultra large black hole just changes the orbit of any star so it continues to circle around it. All of this is of course what happens on average most of the time, both is still possible with both sizes of black hole.
You are farther away from a larger black hole so the gravitational field is less curved. The varying gravitational strength inside a body is what normally rips it apart. You can calculate the gravitational radius with newtons equations to see for yourself.
Hawking radiation actually deceases with the large a black hole is. Its connected to the curvature of gravitation too. Also, it is so slow that it only becomes a factor after every single star will be long gone.
did JWST change the theories of how super massive black holes accrete material? There will have to be an update on those theories but that could take a while to figure out new ones.
So interesting. I’d love ❤️ to go vacation on a black hole. You could get home before you left. Hi Dr. Becky!
Ok, Becky you can explain how the stuff never gets there because time so slowed but is there because of the black ball and if the size is one plank square per information stored
I would love if you did a video on the density of BHs. Do all black holes have the same density? Is there an upper universal density limit? Etc