[Red Badger]

PinG!..........................

[buckalfa]

#blackholesmatter ?

[TexasCajun]

How big, size wise, would that thing be?

[CaptainMorgantown]

The Good News: The biggest black holes that we can see are only 50 billion times more massive than the sun.

The Bad News: We can’t see the REALLY big ones.

[TexasTransplant]

According to my chalkboard it is 51.302756621734491 times as big with our Sun measured at 3:1307 Zulu Eastern Standard Time 12/20/2015.

Algore had no input but agreed that it proves Global Warming is even more dire than earlier predictions. Carbon Credits will no longer save us! Super Massive Carbon Credits are now the only way to survive past 2020.

[Steely Tom]

No more than 50 galaxies for you, Mr. Hole. You’re cut off.

And take that Hawking radiation somewhere else, please.

[Flick Lives]

Scientists discovered that black holes have a size limit, as when it gets so big, the gas which feeds the great void loses its energy, and falls into the unknown.

"Falls into the unknown"? What kind of explanation is this?

Since a black hole can only be observed indirectly thru its gravitational effect, perhaps when it reaches a certain mass the spacial bending becomes so massive even the indirect effect can't be seen.

[I want the USA back]

I feel better now. I thought they would keep growing indefinitely and eat up the whole universe.

[Conservative4Ever]

I swear my closet works the same way. I blame the shoes.

[SgtHooper]

And you can bank on that one.

[The Cajun]

Just because a black hole looses its’ accretion disk,
doesn't mean the intense gravitational field will stop pulling any matter that came close enough in and still grow.....I would think??

What am I missing here?

[caver]

This is from the same academics that push the climate change BS.

[DungeonMaster]

This is a very poorly written article. Data is missing and it doesn't make sense. I see this kind of writing in other things that I've been studying for a long time. Writers are taking notes and regurgitating things they don't understand.

Something I learned about black holes that blew my mind. There is NO MATTER in the center of a black hole. Matter is collapsed to nothing, thus destroyed, and only the gravity remains.

[billslugg]

The article says that black holes can grow to any size by merging with other black holes, but there is an upper mass limit for a black hole growing by accretion of gas in its vicinity. When the black hole gets large enough, the radiation from the accretion zone fills such a large volume surrounding the black hole that the gas cannot cool any more. The volume of a cloud of hot gas increases by the cube of the radius, but the surface area of the cloud only increases by the square of the radius, At some point the surface area is not large enough to dissipate the heat of the enclosed gas cloud. The intense radiation pressure of the black hole thus forces the gas away and it cannot enter the black hole any more. The black hole stops growing at about 10 billion solar masses. Here is a quote from the original article at ArXive:

“As the black hole grows, an outflow drives a shell into the surrounding gas which stalls after a dynamical time-scale at a radius determined by the BH mass. The gas trapped inside this bubble cools, forms stars and is recycled as accretion and outflow. Once the BH reaches a critical mass, this region attains a size such that the gas can no longer cool efficiently. The resulting energy-driven flow expels the remaining gas as a super wind.”