Small Galaxy Packs Massive Black Hole (SPACE.com)

This is another enigma that I cannot completely understand. I have read professor Hawkings book on black holes three times and I am still none the wiser. If black holes suck in all matter from near them they must get bigger and suck in even more matter, or to put it another way, more matter, more gravitational pull. This means that one day all matter in the universe will be sucked it by the black hokes. This in turn means that all the black holes will in the end attract the other or nearest black holes, ad ifinitum. My qustion is, will this super black hole then be unstable and explode into another big bang? If that is the answer then we have an everlasting universe that expands and contracts ad infinitum. I would appreciate an answer to this question.

Very well said.

What if the these black holes are the furnaces of the "dark matter" smelter?

Then the amount of matter being "smelted" to dark matter would change the amount and ratios of matter/dark matter which exist in our universe. At some point, wouldn't this cause the cataclysmic undulations that you speak of?

Ron

"all the black holes will in the end attract the other or nearest black holes, ad ifinitum. My qustion is, will this super black hole then be unstable and explode into another big bang?"

I hear that the accelarting expansion of our universe will cause galaxies -- and the supermassive black holes (SMBH) at their centers -- to become increasingly farther apart. My understanding of this recently accepted scenario is that eventually our universe will end up consisting of vast stretches of dark empty space (all stars burned out), with an occassional SMBH slowly shrinking over trillions of years as it glows with Hawking radiation. Pretty bleak. Of course we don't really know what to expect since we don't understand dark energy or dark matter.

Regarding the possibility that the "mega-supermassive black hole" (resulting from conglomeration of our universe's many black holes) might be unstable and explode into a new big bang, this sounds entirely plausible to me (a chemist). The singularity theorized to exist at the center of a black hole is a quantum-sized object. So it should obey quatum mechanics, which predicts a non-zero probability that at some random time a good portion of the singularity's mass should appear outside of the event horizon. At that instant (which might happen after a few minutes, or a trillion years), the singularity should explode.

Good answer, svengali!

One quibble: the singularity inside a big black hole may be quantum-sized, but the event horizon is not. If a bit of mass tunnels out of the singularity, but is still inside the event horizon, it should inevitably fall back into the singularity. Similarly, if a bit of matter just inside the event horizon tunnels through to the outside, it wall fall in again unless it is moving very fast.

If we wait for buhzillions of years, a BIG chunk of matter might tunnel out a LONG way from the event horizon - but by then the hole should have evaporated by Hawking radiation anyway. At least that's how the theory looks at present. Wait for the next big paper by Thorne, Hawking, or Turner!