Monday 24 October 2011

Is there a limit to the size of a black hole?

There's no theoretical limit. If you had enough energy to move stars or galaxies, you could in theory keep feeding a black hole until it became enormously large, larger even than the Milky way for example. But there are practical limits past which black holes are unlikely to grow.



The two reasons for this are that 1), black holes aren't efficient at taking in matter. They can spit out as much as 90% of the energy from the matter that falls into them, and 2) once they reach a certain size, black holes are too large to form accretion disks, so matter tends to orbit around them rather than funnel into them.



Source and Source.



As to your 2nd question




Imagine that all the matter in the universe formed a black hole.
Should that be possible or is there a law which forbids creating it?




I've pondered this one myself and I have no idea the answer. Is there a size past which Dark Energy would overcome gravitation? Dark energy operating inside the black hole might overcome the gravitation past a certain size, but that's just my novice speculation and I think the black hole would need to be billions of light years across for that to happen.



I don't know the answer to that one. I'd be curious if anyone does though.

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