this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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Astronomy
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So it is at ten times Jupiters mass, and eats like a growing boy.
Interesting to see. Will it be able to feed up enough to ignite? For that it would need about a thousand Jupiter masses (so much about Jupiter just missing to turn into a sun...).
More mass, more gravity, more attractive to free-floating matter. But still some way to go from 10 to 1000 Jupiters.
According to Wikipedia, it only needs to be 80 times as massive:
Six billion tons a second ends up as an increase of about seven orders of magnitude lower than jupiters mass in a year, so it’s still several millions of years away from that point, assuming linear growth. I see no reason to assume linear growth, but this is probably still not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
OK, different source, different numbers. I thought I had a good source.
I disagree on the millions of years in the future, though: the more mass it gets, the faster it acquires more, so this is more exponential than linear. It won't be anytime soon, yes, but maybe faster than you think.
Yeah, I agree it’s definitely not going to be linear growth, but I don’t think any potential great grandchildren of ours will live to see it.
Agreed, they won't. By far. Maybe even humans won't see it lighting up.
But also the bigger it gets, the faster it clears its orbit, so the slower it grows.
Interesting aspect, yes. Now we need someone with the right simulation tools who can run this for a better answer.