this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
29 points (100.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
2325 readers
2 users here now
There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
- ex. How do I change oil
- ex. How to tie shoes
- ex. Can you cry underwater?
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!
Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice ๐.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Does this mean if we had a huge empty sphere in space, not around a star, (empty Dyson sphere) it could form a black hole with all the mass at the outside edge of the sphere?
So, something becomes a black hole when there's too much mass in too small a space.
For a given amount of mass, that's the Schwarzschild radius:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius
A Dyson sphere would need to avoid collapsing its matter into something smaller than the Schwarzschild radius; if it did, then it would become a black hole. If they don't collapse, then no.
I don't know how Dyson spheres are supposed to avoid gravitational collapse.
goes looking
Okay. Looks like what they do is to basically consist of a bunch of solid satellites that are in orbit but don't collide. They aren't actually a single solid object; the name is something of a misnomer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/zqg6e/is_a_dyson_sphere_actually_possible_or_would_it/
But a solar-system-sized sphere of gas can't do that, because you can't keep the orbits of the gas from smacking into each other.