Forbidden black holes and ancient stars hide in these 'tiny red dots' (image)

[Admin]

The James Webb Space Telescope found "tiny red dots" in the early universe representing overgrown supermassive black holes and stars that are impossibly old for the infant cosmos.

Forbidden black holes and ancient stars hide in these 'tiny red dots' (image) : Read more

 

[skynr13]

In this perspective of the early universe, having another Sun within our Solar System is highly plausible even now. Since the early Universe had incredible amounts of hydrogen, then imagine if Jupiter (a failed star) had such an enormous amount of Hydrogen while it was being birthed. That would make possible another Sun in our Solar System easily. As for having a BH near to Earth as 26 LY's, I will leave that up to the comments, because I think in not too much time our entire Solar System would be sucked into infinitum!!

 

[Unclear Engineer]

For Jupiter to become a second sun in our solar system, it would need to have at least 75 times the mass it really has - and then it would only be a red dwarf star, nowhere near as bright as the Sun. But, the additional mass in the orbit of Jupiter would probably make substantial changes to the orbits of the inner planets, including the Earth. It is not clear what that would do to Earth's climate and thus its habitability. There are planets that circle pairs of stars, and there are planets that circle only one star of binary star systems. But, we have not determined if any of those have life on them.

Regarding the black hole that is "26 light years away from Earth", do you mean the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy? That is 26 thousand light years away. The closest known black hole to Earth is Gaia-BH1, located 1,560 light-years away. But, even at 26 light years away, Gaia-BH1 would not "suck Earth in" because we would still not be even in bound orbits with each other.

 

[skynr13]

According to 'ask a mathematician', Jupiter needs to be a hundred times more massive and 20% bigger to become like a regular Sun, and my remark was only conjecture anyway, regardless of there being planets in between. But with hydrogen so available in the early Universe, it still seems possible to pack on that extra mass and size. Now I guess something you missed in the article was the distance to the central BH in this condensed galaxy was comparable to our central BH being 26 light years away from Earth. And although the accretion disk of Sag A* only spans a region a few times the diameter of our solar system, which is about one LY, I think it would still be possible for it to really mess things up for the Earthlings that live here.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

In other circumstances, it is certainly possible for 2 stars to form close enough together to be similar to what our solar system would be like if Jupiter had become as massive as the Sun. Sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn't happen. In our solar system, it didn't happen.

Regarding the "26 light years to a black hole": now I understand what you were alluding to, but it is only a scale comparison. The black holes in those distant galaxies are even bigger than the one in our galaxy, and they are active, while ours is not so active. So, much more effect from being close to one of them than being close to our galactic center. And, the density of stars around those black holes is much higher than in our galaxy, so, as the article states, "Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years away) would be within the solar system" if the Milky Way was shrunk by a factor of 1000. And that would put Earth only 93 thousand miles from our Sun, inside Mercury's real orbit. The climate on Earth would be nothing like it really is, now. So, yes, all of those factors would mess up the chances for life here on Earth.

But, all of that happened 13.4 billion years ago. Who knows what those galaxies are like today, other than it seems unlikely that their black holes could have become smaller over time, and they were already huge.