A black hole begins to consume the universe, what happens when it consumes the entire thing?

Question

A black hole begins to consume the universe, what happens when it consumes the entire thing?

Answer 1

No not really... but kinda.

Over a few hundred billion years all hydrogen will run out and stars will stop forming. Large black holes will persist and continue to consume the remains of the universe. Super clusters will split apart as the universe expands and local groups will merge. Super Massive Black Holes in the centers of galaxies will merge creating newer bigger Super Massive Black Holes. Sooner or later most matter will be in the form of black holes.

However, over time these black holes decay letting off Hawking Radiation. Over another few hundred billion years the last Super Massive Black Holes decay to nothing and all that will be left are radiation particles spread thinly over a nearly infinitely large universe. This is known as the Heat Death of the universe.

Answer 2

A black hole would not consume the universe.  Once you get a few AUs (Earth-sun distance) from a BH, gravity behaves normally.  A BH -- even a super massive BH  -- would not consume the universe, any more than the gravity of a galaxy would consume the universe.

In fact, a supermassive BH is still only a small fraction of a galaxy.  For example, a BH might have the mass of 20 billion suns, in the center of a galaxy with 100 billion or more stars.  Random orbit "near" passes among the stars will cause them to be throw out of the galaxy, with very very few falling into the BH.  Eventually, 99% of the stars leave the galaxy, and the BH gets 1%.  Then over billions of billions of years, the BH  evaporates into light and neutrinos, which speed through the universe for the rest of time.

Answer 3

  That is one reason a black hole can't exist eventually it would be alone and sit for eternity doing nothing.

Answer 4

If it's true the universe is expanding forever, it's quite unlikely that a BH would consume everything, since the vacuum of space would be empty of matter...as things are spread out more and more.

It the universe is not expanding forever and will go back to the 'crunch' then it's very possible that a super super super BH could eat all the matter up and energy too. What happens after that? A collapse of this universe, like a bubble/balloon being popped and the singularity in the BH is the last known thing to exist before it fizzles out of existence.

However, energy has to go somewhere, so theoretically, the matter and energy consumed from this universe would be placed in another old universe or through the act of creating a new one.

interesting.

Answer 5

A black hole, no matter how massive, simply can't consume the entire universe. Remember, the effects of gravity weaken by a factor of four for every doubling of the distance from the gravitational source. Also science has found that the expansion rate of our universe is increasing, therefore space is growing larger which further weakens the gravitational pull of even the most immense black hole you can imagine.

Answer 6

There's no way for a black hole to consume the entire universe.

A black hole's growth is only propelled by what's around it. It eats everything around it and everything that orbits into it's path, but there's no way that every thing in the universe could come in contact with a black hole. It isn't like it grows on it own, it needs food. And at some point there would be a void of blank space where it would run out of fuel and stop growing for the moment.

AND at the same time so many billions of stars are being born per minute that the black hole could never keep up.

So the whole situation is actually quite impossible.

But if it DID happen... I'm sure Jesus would start breakdancing or something. Maybe catch up on all of the old episodes of the Sopranos that he's neglected to watch even though he bought the box set of the 3rd season from Target like, three years ago!

Gosh. Lazy Jesus. ^_^

Answer 7

That's actually one of the beleived theory's of how the universe would end. As galaxys move through space they often times come across another galaxy and after a very long time, the larger galaxy will completely consume the smaller galaxy. Making the larger galaxy, and its black hole, even larger. Which in turn makes it's event horizon(the point where nothing can escape its gravitational pull) even larger than before.  It's one of the theories of the end of the universe that this will continue until this super large black hole, that has been consuming other galaxies for billions of years, is so dense and massive that it's gravity can't hold itself together anymore and explode. Causing a bing bang such as beleived are universe was derived from.