Is there any possibility that the planet Jupiter could collapse in on itself and become a black hole?
Or perhaps any other planet in our Solar System for that matter.
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8 Responses to “ Is there any possibility that the planet Jupiter could collapse in on itself and become a black hole? ”
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No, that can’t happen. Only stars many times the mass of our sun can do that naturally. You could theoretically create a black hole out of anything, from Jupiter to you, by crushing it down far enough, but there is no natural process by which this could happen.
No, the Sun can’t even do that, and it’s many times bigger than Jupiter. You need something several times bigger than the Sun to collapse into a black hole.
No.
Ah, I know where you got this idea–you’ve been watching the movie ’2010–Odyssey Two’ based on the book by Arthur C. Clarke. Well, I’ll grant you that old ACC was a brilliant fellow, and he gave the world the benifit of a lot of that brilliance; but having Jupiter collapse in on itself was misleading, to say the least. I’m dubious that even high-tech aliens would manage the feat–which is how it was done in the movie. Certainly it couldn’t happen in Nature, because it just doesn’t work like that. Jupiter would have to be considerably more massive in order for it to happen. Even our parent sun, which is about 300 times more massive than Jupiter, is not going to collapse into a Black Hole–even the Sun is not massive enough for that to happen. As for the rest of the gas giants, they a large bodies, but all of them are considerably less massive than Jupiter (which is ca. 1300 times Earth mass). So none of them are going to invert themselves anytime soon either.
To become star,Jupiter requires 60 times mass it have at present.
So to become black hole it may require 400 times mass!
According to the Chandrasekhar limit, for an object to eventually collapse into a black hole, it must have a mass of at least 1.4 Solar masses and be composed of matter of very high density. Anything less than this mass and of low enough density means that the outward pressure of the object withstands the inward gravitational force.
As a postscript (and just to show off!) I once calculated the size of the Earth were it theoretically to collapse into a black hole. It turns out that the radius of the Earth’s event horizon it would have been the same as a golf ball. Good, eh?
I think there is still some mystery surrounding Jupiter, like, why doesn’t it just become a ball of ices of water, methane and ammonia. Why is it generating such a large amount of heat? Why does it have a magnetic field many times stronger than that of Earth?
None of the planets in our solar system have enough mass to collapse to a black hole.
Even our sun isn’t massive enough – it would have to be at least 3 times its current mass to form a black hole.
Jupiter is about one thousandth the mass of the sun, so Jupiter would have to be 3000 times its current mass to collapse to a black hole.