Sunday, March 25, 2018

Throwing a micro black hole into the sun: does it collapse into a black hole or does it result in a supernova?


What do we know about accretion rates of micro black holes? Suppose a relative small black hole (mass about $10^9$ kilograms) would be thrown into the sun. Eventually this black hole will swallow all matter into the star, but how much time will pass before this happens?


Are there any circumstances where the black hole would trigger a gravitational collapse in the core, and result in a supernova?



There seems to be some margin for the accretion heating to counter or exceed the heating from fusion, so it could throw the star over the temperature threshold for carbon-12 fusion and above. The black hole is converting nearly 80% - 90% of the rest-mass of the accretion matter to heat, while fusion is barely getting about 0.5% - 1%.


Bonus question: Could this be used to estimate a bound on primordial micro black holes with the fraction of low-mass stars going supernova?



Answer



The micro black hole would be unable to accrete very quickly at all due to intense radiation pressure.


The intense Hawking radiation would have an luminosity of $3.6 \times 10^{14}$ W, and a roughly isotropic flux at the event horizon of $\sim 10^{48}$ W m$^{-2}$.


The Eddington limit for such an object is only $6 \times 10^{9}$ W. In other words, at this luminosity (or above), the accretion stalls as matter is driven away by radiation pressure. There is no way that any matter from the Sun would get anywhere near the event horizon. If the black hole was rotating close to the maximum possible then the Hawking radiation would be suppressed and accretion at the Eddington rate would be allowed. But this would then drop the black hole below its maximum spin rate, leading to swiftly increasing Hawking radiation again.


As the black hole evaporates, the luminosity increases, so the accretion problem could only become more severe. The black hole will entirely evaporate in about 2000 years. Its final seconds would minutely increase the amount of power generated inside the Sun, but assuming that the ultra-high energy gamma rays thermalised, this would be undetectable.


EDIT: The Eddington limit may not be the appropriate number to consider, since we might think that the external pressure of gas inside the Sun might be capable of squeezing material into the black hole. The usual Eddington limit is calculated assuming that the gas pressure is small compared with the radiation pressure. And indeed that is probably the case here. The gas pressure inside the Sun is $2.6 \times 10^{16}$ Pa. The outward radiation pressure near the event horizon would be $\sim 10^{40}$ Pa. The problem is that the length scales are so small here that it is unclear to me that these classical arguments will work at all. However, even if we were to go for a more macroscopic 1 micron from the black hole, the radiation pressure still significantly exceeds the external gas pressure.


Short answer: we wouldn't even notice - nothing would happen.


Bonus Question: The answer to this is it doesn't have a bearing on the supernova rate, because the mechanism wouldn't cause supernovae. Even if the black hole were more massive and could grow, the growth rate would be slow and no explosive nucleosynthesis would occur because the gas would not be dense enough to be degenerate.



Things change in a degenerate white dwarf, where the enhanced temperatures around an accreting mini-black hole could set off runaway thermonuclear fusion of carbon, since the pressure in a degenerate gas is largely independent of temperature. This possibility has been explored by Graham et al (2015) (thanks Timmy), who indeed conclude that type Ia supernova rates could constrain the density of micro black holes in the range $10^{16}$ to $10^{21}$ kg.


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