It's only 4600 light years away. If it collapses in to blackhole, it would be the closest blackhole to the earth? In few 10s of thousands of year, can it devour solar system?
What actually happens is that the object shrinks - according the to the currently accepted models into a single dimensional point. The mass now being confined to a singularity, the gradient of the gravity as you get near becomes extreme, reaching infinity at the singularity. The gradient never could get so extreme before because the mass was diffused over a much bigger volume.
Imagine replacing the Sun with a black hole of equal mass. Apart from the lack of visible light, the gravity we here on Earth would experience would be exactly the same as before, as would every single planet that is currently orbiting. What would change is the distribution of mass inside the sun. The event horizon would be at about 6kms from the Singularity. You could now hypothetically approach the Sun to within ~10km from the center and still stay outside of the event horizon, but the gravity gradient at that point would be unimaginable. The difference in force applied to a the feet and the head of a hypothetical astronaut in orbit would disintegrate them into atoms, which themselves would possibly be squished into spindles.
With the sun as it is currently, even if you could somehow get to within 10kms of the center, the majority of the mass of the sun would be actually outside of this sphere so the net gravity you'd experience would be negligible (compared to the black hole scenario).
The way I picture it, is once you reach the black-hole state, there is a regime change which make it more easy to gulp matter in. I guess how big and how fast it grows depends how much mass there is nearby to concentrate.
Once formed they tend to an equilibrium with their surrounding dictated by the balance mass-in/evaporation-out.
It's true that they don't have a stellar wind that pushes gas away, but they are born in the void left by their progenitor star, and once they start accreting there will be radiation pushing things again.
So, either way the black hole is is sucking up mass faster than a star.
Black holes are not constantly growing.
Hawking radiation for a 1 solar mass black hole represents less than 1 atom of material lost per billion years (~10^67 years vs ~10^57 atoms) They gain more than that even without a noticeable accretion disk inside our current galaxy.
It’s only very very long time frames after black holes collect this material that they start losing mass on average.
From what I've gathered, evaporation seems to be a really slow process. So I figured that it only gets bigger. The remaining question is how fast.
We know there are very big black holes, though they were formed when conditions were different. I was wondering if there were possibility of a small one slowly by accretion growing into one, and was thinking maybe that if you are already very close to the black hole limit, maybe the neighborhood is also crowded and you could start a snow-ball effect.
There is also the dark-matter/dark-energy issue if it exists, when you are a neutron star, you can pass freely but once a black hole you should collect it as you go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions#...