Black Hole Sun: Quasi-Stars
August 29, 2017
A Black Hole in Balance
What's Happening Here?
When matter falls into a black hole, it's stretched and warped to an extraordinary degree, heating up in the process and giving off a tremendous amount of energy. Usually, the outward pressure of this radiation is usually enough to blow away any surrounding clumps of matter—but if it's not, a quasi-star can form, balanced between the inward gravitational pull of its own mass (and the mass of the black hole) and the outward radiation pressure from matter crossing the event horizon.