Hypothetical Question about Black Holes - What would we have to do to turn our own sun into a blackhole?

Question

From what I've read, in its natural life time our sun will turn into a Red Giant and then shrink up into a white dwarf. There is not enough mass for it to collapse into a blackhole. However, I was wondering if there were certain circumstances that could trigger our sun into becoming a blackhole, no matter how unconventional or unlikely the means may be? This question is just in fun.

I can't think of any logical reason why anyone would want to. I just thought it would be a fun idea to play with. Perhaps for the Dr. Evil inside me, but really just out of fun.

Answer 1

Increase the volume by 20 times, which would be very hard to do. Then when it goes nova the remaining stellar matter is enough to be over 1.4 solar masses so it can collapse into a black hole. If you threw all the planets in the solar system into the sun you probably still wouldn't have the required 1.4 solar masses, you would need another few gas giants or an additional small star.

According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#Formation_of_stellar-mass_black_holes
"Only the largest remnants, those exceeding 1.4 solar masses (known as the Chandrasekhar limit), generate enough pressure to produce black holes, because singularities are the most radically transformed state of matter known to physics (if you can still call it matter) and the force which resists this level of compression, neutron degeneracy pressure, is extremely strong. Remnants exceeding 5 solar masses are produced by stars which were over 20 solar masses before the collapse (the rest of the mass is usually blown into space by the supernova triggered by the collapse)."

Answer 2

Feed it some 30 or 40 solar masses of hydrogen, and the Sun will become a black hole or the core of it will the moment it tries to fuse iron. Iron nuclei are so stable, any nuclear reactions involving iron soaks up energy like a sponge. Nuclear fusion stops and the tremendous weight of the core can no longer be supported. If it has three or more times the Sun's mass, nothing can stop it's collapse and it becomes a black hole at once. Of course, doing that would also make the Solar System un-inhabitable. Such stars have been caught in the act going supernova and the birth pangs of a newborn black hole have been heard by the SWIFT satellite. Unless the Sun can somehow acquire a huge amount of mass, it will never become a black hole. That is very unlikely, instead it's more likely that the Sun would end up as food for a super massive black hole when the Milky Way mergers with Andromeda billions of years from now. Even then, chances are the Sun will NOT end up being swallowed by a black hole ever.....it will end up as a black dwarf many billions of years from now once all of it's internal heat is radiated into space.

Answer 3

Other than increasing its mass by a lot, it is difficult to imagine a scenario that could work.

Option 1: increase its mass beyond the limit.

Option 2: You could place an astronomical number of rochets around it (pointing inwards, with plates at the nose to cover the entire area) and fire them at the same time in order to compress it suddenly within its own event horizon; however, this would probably require so much fuel that the mass of the rockets would simply reduce the problem to option 1.

Option 3; Same deal but with massive lasers placed so that the sum of all the beams would cover the entire surface: fire all lasers at the same time and the light pressure pushes the sun's surface inwards. The lasers would have to be mounted on the inside face of a Dyson sphere. Such a sphere would probably require so much material that simply dumping that much material into the sun could reduce it to option 1.

Answer 4

Black holes are the result of giant stars running out of fuel and exploding in a supernova blowing off its outer layers. The remainder of the star collapses back on itself with a gravity so intense, nothing can escape it, not even light. This makes what remains invisible which is why they're called black holes. If the Sun were to go supernova, which isn't likely to happen since stars the size of the Sun don't become supernovae, there would be no Earth left to be sucked into the remnant black hole. The explosion would totally destroy the Earth.

Answer 5

Compress it somehow to a small enough volume (I'm not going to go through the exact calculation, expect it to be somewhere around the size of a city) and it will become a blackhole.

Blackhole is not about mass but all about density. Theoretically there maybe lots of miniature black holes in the universe with mass much less than that of Sun or even Moon.

Answer 6

Chandrasekhar said that in order for a dying star to become a super nova or a black hole, it's mass must be 1.4 times that of the sun. This is called the Chandrasekhar Limit.

Answer 7

To turn our sun into a black hole all we'd have to do is cram into it approximately an additional 2.4^30 kilograms of mass. Compressing its existing mass into a smaller volume would have *nothing* to do with whether or not it would become a black hole because gravity is a function of mass, not volume.

Answer 8

increase the suns mass by 50 times but keep it the same volume and that should do it. Or increase the mass while decreasing the volume.

Answer 9

it might work if we got something inside the sun and started cranking out hydrogen like mad from in there. and stuffed basically anything we could find in the sun. or generated a gravitational force field in the middle of the sun, forcing it to collapse in on itself. all probably a bit far-fetched though. hee hee that's not something you think about everday :) at least i don't lol...

Answer 10

Normally I would have a serious answer to this, but I'm curious. Why would anyone want to?