I’m trying to get a feel for something 10B times the size of the sun.
By “size” do they refer to volume or mass?
How far outward would such a beast extend in our solar system?
It’s big alright.
But our national debt is still bigger.
It’s big alright.
But our national debt is still bigger.
Mass. IIRC the radius (event horizon) of a black hole is a linear function of its mass. The radius of a black hole this massive would be about 30 billion kilometers. The solar system would fit quite comfortably inside this volume.
By mass...a black hole is a singularity which means the blackhole itself doesn’t really take up much space at all..however! It’s gravity well would be huge.
It appears from other sources that they are referring to mass. The event horizon for a non-rotating black hole is about 3 km for each solar mass, so these bad boys would have an event horizon of more than 20 astronomical units, or about out to the orbit of Saturn if placed in the same position as our sun. < shudder>
If they are talking about diameter, rather than volume or mass, then they would be 10B times the sun’s diameter which is about 870,000 miles across, which is about 109 times the diameter of the earth.
In another astronomical finding, here is information on the discovery of a planet, Kepler 22b, in the “life zone” of liquid water about 600 light years away.