NASA Just Found A Black Hole Star That Should Not Exist

NASA Just Found A Black Hole Star That Should Not Exist ► Subscribe : @asdtheexplainer We’ve all seen those textbook images of the solar system, where the Sun appears only a bit bigger than Jupiter. But that image doesn’t really capture the vast difference in size. In reality, the Sun is so enormous that nearly 1,000 Jupiters could fit within it. Yet even this impressive size is modest on a cosmic scale—our Sun is far from the largest star out there. That honor belongs to stars like UY Scuti, which dwarfs the Sun to the point where our star seems like a small pebble by comparison. Recently, scientists have discovered something even more astonishing: an ancient star with a black hole at its core. This mysterious phenomenon is both a puzzle and a potential key to understanding the origins of our universe. But how could a black hole exist within a star? Why were these stars so enormous, and what might happen if such a “black hole star” came into our solar system? The answers to these questions could reshape our understanding of the cosmos. Stars act like cosmic blacksmiths, creating most of the elements we find throughout the universe in their intense, fiery cores. However, the stars that may have existed at the dawn of the universe were different from what we see today. Instead of typical stellar cores, these early stars held black holes at their centers, allowing them to reach sizes far beyond what we consider normal. Ordinary stars form from clouds of gas and dust, where gravity pulls the densest regions together until they collapse. This gathered material heats up, forming a protostar—an early stage in a star’s life. Over time, the growing core pulls in more material from the surrounding gas disc, eventually becoming a main sequence star that produces energy through nuclear fusion. Our Sun took about 50 million years to reach this stable phase. Most stars remain in the main sequence phase for the majority of their lives, but as they age, their endings depend on their mass. Smaller stars may become white dwarfs, while larger stars might explode in supernovae, sometimes leaving behind a black hole or neutron star. In about 5 billion years, our Sun will run out of hydrogen, expand into a red giant around 200 times its current size, and then shed its outer layers, transforming into a white dwarf. This compact object will be about the same size as Earth but 200,000 times denser. Over the next 10 billion years, it will gradually cool to around 18 million degrees Fahrenheit and eventually crystallize, much like water turning into ice. In the Sun’s case, once it becomes a white dwarf, it will eventually cool and crystallize, with its core made of solidified carbon and oxygen. Stars over ten times the Sun’s mass, however, meet a different end. These massive stars are large enough for their cores to collapse after a supernova, yet they aren’t quite massive enough to form black holes. Inside such stars, the intense pressure forces protons and electrons to merge, creating neutrons. Neutrons resist being compressed further, balancing the gravitational pull, and the star stabilizes as a neutron star. Neutron stars are among the densest objects in the universe, second only to black holes. They’re about the size of a small city, roughly 12 miles across, but contain as much mass as the Sun. If we could bring a sugar-cube-sized piece of neutron star material to Earth, it would weigh about a billion tons—the mass of a mountain. But how do stars become black holes? While a star is still active, two opposing forces are at work: nuclear fusion pushes outward, while the immense gravitational pull from the star’s own mass tries to compress it. Once the star’s fuel is exhausted, fusion ceases, and gravity takes over. With nothing left to counteract this inward pull, the star collapses into itself, much like a controlled demolition of a building, resulting in the formation of a black hole. Einstein proposed that any object could theoretically become a black hole if it were massive enough and compressed into a sufficiently small space. Black holes continue to grow over their lifetimes, consuming any material that drifts too close. As a black hole absorbs more matter, its gravitational influence expands, pulling in even more nearby material. This growth is somewhat similar to a sinkhole forming as underground structures collapse—except in this case, it's a gravitational “sinkhole” that keeps expanding as the event horizon increases.